


A Matter of Time

by pinesbrosfalls (fangirl0430)



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Sea Grunkles, Seriously "shenanigans" is an understatement, Stan O' War II, The Original Mystery Twins, Time Shenanigans, Update schedule? What's an update schedule?, Will add tags as the fic progresses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2019-05-06 08:59:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14638497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fangirl0430/pseuds/pinesbrosfalls
Summary: Stan and Ford’s investigations bring them to a little town off the East coast, and it doesn’t take long for things to get… odd.In which time is either lost, broken, or a just real pain in the neck, and things are never as simple they should be.





	1. Prologue

It’s a subdued afternoon at port, sunlight filtering through a layer of frothy clouds and reflecting off the waves that lap at the wooden dock. Seagulls drift idly overhead, seemingly suspended in the light salt-tanged breeze. Their calls occasionally interrupt the white noise of the many carbon-fiber hulls knocking gently against the deck. It’s a soft, comfortable silence that Stan has learned to appreciate, if only for the way it allows his off-tune whistling to carry through the air.

His boots _clunk_ on the deck with every step, one hand stuffed deep in his pocket to ward off the chill the air has begun to take on, the other holding a sack of supplies slung over his shoulder. The further north they make their way up the coast, the more he thinks he likes the cold. Sure, it makes his joints a little more stiff than usual and the water a bit more unbearable. But nothing could take away from that crisp edge to the air, the invigorating bite of it against his cheeks, the chill toning down the burn of the sun beating down on them out at sea. It’s nothing like the winter in Gravity Falls that he’d grown so accustomed to, where the cold weighed heavy with the promise of storms and feet of snow to trap him indoors, alone with nothing but his thoughts and the metal structure just downstairs. Back then, he always dreaded the turn of season, hated the first hint of chill after the heat of summer.

Now, he decides, he could start to like it.

Especially since it gives him an excuse to wear more layers, he thinks with a smirk, his jacket and other pockets laden with… “acquired goods”.

He hops on the deck of the Stan O’ War with practiced ease, the impact causing a twinge in his knees that disappears almost immediately. He drops the sack full of refill supplies in the middle of the floor with a _thump_.

“Honey, I’m home!” he calls dramatically, though a quick survey of the boat yields no traces of his twin outside. He frowns, dragging the supplies into the cabin where finds the man inspecting the newly-replaced window over the kitchen table. “Hey nerd, I’m ho—”

“Yes, yes, I heard you the first time,” Ford waves him off.

“Rude,” Stan scoffs, though he knows better than to take it to heart. He toes off his boots by the door. “So, I take it that shmuck finally made it out to replace the broken window?”

“Yes,” Ford says, still considering the window in question with a disapproving look. “Though, the quality of his repair is… questionable at best.” Stan hums, walking over to stand next to his brother and rapping against the small porthole with his knuckles. The thing doesn’t fall out of the wall, and it’s still in one piece as compared to its predecessor that got shattered during the last Kraken attack.

“Seems okay to me,” Stan shrugs, heading back to his bunk to empty his pockets and take off his coat.

“I think there’s a draft coming through it,” Ford says, holding his hand up to the edge of the glass. “I might reseal it with some of that adhesive, just to be safe.”

“The last time you broke that alien stuff out, you almost glued three of your fingers together. I really don’t think some stupid window is worth the effort.”

“I don’t know,” Ford says. “A leak could cause a lot of problems.”

“Or it could be fine and you’re worrying about nothing,” Stan says, plopping down on his bed. “Leave it alone. We’ll check on it during the next storm or something.” Ford seems to give the window one more, cursory look (Stan would go so far as to call it a warning look) before conceding and turning away to raise an eyebrow at him.

“You’re looking lumpier than usual,” he comments.

“And you’re lookin’ old. What’s your point?” Stan says, pulling the first few not-so-legally-obtained items out of his pocket. _Bigfoot snow globe, monogrammed pen, bottle opener in the shape of a fish, couple postcards—_

“Are you capable of leaving a port _without_ stealing something?” Ford asks half-heartedly, picking up the snow globe and giving it a good shake before adding it to the collection on the shelf in the kitchen.

“Practice makes perfect,” Stan says. _Shot glass, couple key chains, handful of candy. Next pocket._ “Gotta keep taking the small stuff that way I’ll be ready when it’s something important.”

“You know, we have enough money to _actually_ pay for things,” Ford says. “You don’t _have_ to steal.” _Mason jar full of soap, more postcards and key chains._

“But where’s the fun in that?” he grins. “Besides, I got you something.”

“Oh?” Ford says, intrigued, the argument dropping completely. Stan smirks, knowing Ford gave up really caring about his shop-lifting habits long ago and only brings it up now out of a sense of morality. Stan had won him over pretty fast with a few well-received gifts.

“Yep, two actually,” he says, first handing over the bunch of pens he fished out of his pocket. Ford takes them and examines them with a laugh. Each one is shaped like a small sasquatch, the pen tip protruding from the head and the click-button coming out of the feet, the shoulders creating what Stan realized was actually a semi-comfortable grip. He’d known Ford would get a kick out of them.

“These are horrible,” Ford laughs.

“I know, right,” Stan agrees. “And, the piéce de résistance.” He unzips his jacket and produces the thing that almost got the cops called on him on his way out of the store: a large, yellow, metal wall sign with “Beware Bigfoot” written in big bold letters, the words split above and below a silhouette of a sasquatch walking just behind a hiker.

“How in the multiverse did you hide _that_?” Ford exclaims, taking the sign.

“Don’t ask. I barely understand it myself.” He wheedles a small bigfoot plushie out of his sleeve, figuring they’ll send it to Mabel in the next care package. “It’s a gift and a curse.”

“Yes, well, unfortunately, I guess I’m stuck with you and your _curse_ ,” Ford says dramatically, putting the sign and pens down on his desk. Stan sticks his tongue out at him, and Ford responds in kind, rolling his eyes good-naturedly as he picks back up one of the bigfoot pens and clicks it a few times. “Did you only grab sasquatch memorabilia?”

“Honestly, this stuff barely scratched the surface of what they had,” Stan says, popping one of the stolen hard candies in his mouth. “Place is obsessed with bigfoot, apparently. They had tours of the woods at the edge of town and everything. Made the Mystery Shack look small-time.”

“Which is funny,” Ford says, clicking the pen a few more times, “because I’ve met the last remaining sasquatch in North America, and she _hates_ the East Coast.”

“ _She?_ ”

“Yes Stanley, she’s a female. Get with the times, old man.”

“Why am I not surprised you’ve met Lady Bigfoot?” Stan sighs, rolling the fruit-flavored candy to the other side of his mouth.

“She had a short stint in Gravity Falls,” Ford says. “I stumbled into her den on accident during my early researching years. She was quite friendly, if memory serves. Offered me some kind of home-brewed tea and told me a bit about her travels.”

“Wait wait wait,” Stan says. “You’re tellin’ me that I had the _actual_ bigfoot in my backyard all these years, and I never once got a chance to capitalize on that?”

“Well, she didn’t wind up staying for long. She got sick of the gnomes and left a few months later.” Ford gives the pen one last click before setting it down with the others.

“God, gnomes are pests,” Stan groans, mourning all the money that he would have had with the _actual bigfoot_ back at the Shack. He crumples the plastic candy wrapper in his hand and tosses it at the trash can across the room, missing by a foot or so.

“They _are_ an invasive species,” Ford says. “I’m pretty sure I saw a couple sniffing around the dock earlier.”

“So I _wasn’t_ going crazy when I thought I saw a few scampering around town,” Stan says, pushing himself to his feet with a groan to go throw out the wrapper on the ground. “Those little bastards really are everywhere.”

“I actually have a theory,” Ford says, leaning back against his paper-strewn desk, “that the tribe in Gravity Falls is the mother-clan and that all others are off-shoots of it—”

Stan only makes it two steps towards the trashcan before there’s a sharp prick in his ball of his foot, the sudden jab making him jump back and curse loudly enough to cut Ford’s rambling short.

“What is it?” Ford asks as Stan tries to hobble back to the bed on his heel.

“Think I stepped on a piece of glass,” he says, falling back on the bed with enough weight to make the mattress springs groan. “ _Damn_ that hurt.”

“I thought we swept it all up last week,” Ford says, scowling and rushing to grab the first aid kit.

“Guess not,” Stan says, his bones creaking and groaning as he props his foot up on the opposite knee to get a look. A small bead of blood is the only visual indication of the shard’s location, the glass itself probably too small to actually be seen in his foot. With how carefully they’d cleaned and swept the cabin after that window broke, he’s more surprised than anything that there was any glass left to step on. They’d been so careful to get it all, and yet here he is, stepping on a shard out in the middle of the cabin floor.

He remembers their Ma used to use an old piece of bread to clean up glass shards whenever something would break back home, and he wonders if they should try that, since sweeping alone obviously didn’t work.

“You need help getting it out?” Ford asks, setting the first aid kit on the bed next to him and rifling through it to get the tweezers.

“I think I’ve got it,” Stan says, nabbing a piece of gauze and using it to wipe the small bit of blood. “You may want to go undock before the cops come looking for you, though.”

“You mean before they come looking for _you_ ,” Ford says, handing over the tweezers with an eyebrow raised.

“We have the same face, brainiac.”

“Touché.” Ford gives him a soft nudge before heading towards the door and stopping, turning back with a smile that simply _screams_ bad intentions. “I bet I can get us completely undocked and on our way in under two minutes.”

“And break my record? Fat chance,” Stan scoffs.

“I’ll wager one week’s coffee rations I can do it,” Ford says. Stan pauses, giving his brother’s devious smile a moment of consideration. The thought of getting to relish an extra cup of coffee in the morning would be enough reward in and of itself. But even that is nothing compared to the fact that the lack of coffee would allow him to herd Ford to bed at an earlier hour, preventing the nerd from staying up until the wee-hours of the morning scribbling in his journal. On the other hand, if he lost, Stan isn’t sure he could survive a whole week with no coffee to chase off the dredges of sleep in the morning.

“Which way is the current moving?” Stan asks cautiously. Ford just shrugs, the devious smile remaining perfectly in place.

“I believe is was moving towards the dock when we came in,” he says, keeping steady eye-contact to such an extent that Stan almost finds it unnerving. “I could be wrong.” Stan hums, trying to think back to their docking earlier in the day and coming to a similar unsure conclusion. _Maybe that was the last port…_

“Alright,” he says. “You’re on, Poindexter. Two minutes.”

“Two minutes is all I need,” Ford grins even wider, reaching out and shaking his brother’s hand over Stan’s still propped-up foot to seal the deal. “Although, I do think I was wrong about the current direction—”

“Nope!” Stan exclaims, ripping his hand away. “Deal’s off. No way.”

“A bet’s a bet, Stanley,” Ford smirks. “You already shook on it. You can’t back out now.”

“A handshake doesn’t mean _squat_ ,” Stan tries.

“Do you _really_ want to have that conversation with _me_ of all people, Lee?” Ford says, raising an eyebrow. “Because I’d beg to differ.” Stan sighs, already recognizing a losing battle when he sees one.

“You know,” Stan says, “ _I’m_ supposed to be the conman of the family. Not you.”

“And I’m the multi-dimensional outlaw,” Ford says, turning towards the door with a bit of pep in his step. “What did you expect?”

“You know, I hope the cops find you and think you’re me.”

“I’ll just point them in here towards you.”

“Yeah, I’m sure they’ll buy the whole ‘twin brother’ shtick.”

“Twins? Please,” Ford drones, hand on the door handle as he turns to give a dramatic pause, raising one eyebrow. “You wish you could look this good.”

“Get outta here!” Stan hollers, grabbing a handful of candy off the bed next to him and pegging it in his brother’s direction. The hard candies bounce off the door, Ford’s laughter and footsteps receding across the deck behind the now-closed door and making him smile. “I already started the timer!” Ford yells back, something muffled that he can’t quite decipher and that his hearing aids didn’t pick up enough of. He assumes it was something along the lines of ‘No, you didn’t’ and shakes his head, turning his attention to the glass shard still embedded in his foot. It’s as good a distraction as any from the dread of the coffee-less week surely ahead of him.

Maybe he can get it out fast enough to run out on deck and sabotage the undocking.

A minute of squinting and poking with the tweezers later, he manages to get the tiny piece of glass out, dabbing the spot on his foot with the gauze although the bleeding has basically already stopped. He’s on his feet as fast as he can manage, a lack of sharp pains or other unwanted sensations in the sole of his foot proving that he got it all, and he transfers the piece of glass from the tweezers to the used gauze, folding it inside so it doesn’t end up on the ground again as he darts over to the trashcan. Before he makes it there, he hears the tell-tale groan of the engines rumbling through the hull. He groans, knowing he’s already lost, kissing his precious coffee privileges goodbye for the week as he lifts the trashcan lid.

The boat lurches just slightly, probably as Ford pulls off the dock.

Stan adjusts his balance to compensate.

But then there’s a shift, like the world tilting slightly on its axis, his vision swimming and clouding for a terrifying moment before it snaps back into focus not even a fraction of a second later, barely enough time for him to register or figure out what happened. He shakes off the disorientation, glancing up to realize…

He’s not in the cabin anymore.

He’s out on the deck.

He doesn’t remember walking outside.

Stan squints against the sudden change in brightness, the partially concealed sun making the back of his head throb. The boat is slowly making its way out of the channel, the waves parting against its bow, a seagull letting out a cry somewhere overhead.

_What the—_

“One minute, forty-seven seconds!” he hears from behind him, spinning around to find his brother at the helm, smile beaming victoriously.

Stan realizes he still has the gauze with the shard of glass in it crumpled in his hand.

He turns back to the sea ahead, cold air brushing steadily past and catching in his unzipped jacket, the deck rough and freezing under his still-bare feet. The hard candy has switched sides in his mouth, he realizes too. Nothing besides him seems out of place, the sky still the same cloud-speckled blue, the ocean the same calm, shimmering waves, the boat still solid underfoot.

It’s just as if the last ten to twenty seconds, the time it took him to leave the cabin, are just blank, gone, wiped clean. The small stretch of time is just… lost.

“Stan, are you alright?” Ford catches his attention once more, and he turns back to see that the smile has dimmed slightly, a note of concern edging into his brother’s expression in the form of slightly drawn eyebrows and a tilt of his head.

The last thing he wants to do is freak Ford out, and Stan knows that this would do it. For the last year, his brother has been all too vigilant when it came to his memory, constantly watching for lapses that never happened and quizzing and testing him every chance he got. Stan’s been fine. His memory came back perfectly after that first week, and he hasn’t had a single problem since.

This, whatever it was, might be unrelated. He’s getting old; memory slips happen.

_Yeah. That has to be what it is._

_Just a small memory slip._

_No big deal._

His head isn’t throbbing like it was moments ago. But there’s still a pressure, a strange discomfort that doesn’t go unnoticed, reminiscent of the stress headaches he used to get after late nights working on the portal.

“Yeah,” Stan says, shaking the thoughts loose and shoving the gauze and shard of glass in his pocket to throw out later. He smiles back at Ford, switching the candy back to the other side of his mouth. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just deciding how exactly I’m going to sneak my morning cup of Joe.”

It has the intended effect, seeming to appease the concern that had briefly slipped in, Ford immediately squinting over at him in mock accusation, starting on some tangent about fair bets and wagers that Stan doesn’t pay attention to, still lost in his own head.

_It’s no big deal._

He turns back around, watching as the docks slip from his field of view as they navigate back out to open waters to continue their way North, towards the spot Ford has been trying to nail down for the past month.

His fingers squeeze the wrapped glass shard in his pocket, the pressure in the back of his head finally subsiding.

_Not a big deal at all._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~It's a big deal...~~
> 
> Well, here we go.
> 
> This is just the Prologue, so I'm introducing themes and ideas that will be important or returned to later. Chapter One is going to start the meat of the fic, so be ready for that! My hope for this fic is to post weekly, probably on the weekends, so be sure to keep an eye out!


	2. Chapter 1: Double

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The one with the blip, the beach, and the blurry vision._

For Stanford Pines, there has always been something enticing about the unknown. It’s some thrill, some inkling of fear or excitement (thirty years and he can barely tell the difference anymore) that sends a shiver right up his spine and makes his entire being buzz with anticipation. There’s something to be said about discovering that which has never been found before, to understanding it. Whether it’s the multitude of universes waiting just on the other side of a half-built portal or the recurring flicker of some signal on GLADOS.

The Globally Linked Anomaly Detection Operating System (or GLADOS for short, although Dipper for whatever reason had completely blanched when Ford first told him the acronym) is a series of decommissioned military satellites that Fiddleford remotely… repurposed. The satellites were interconnected and tuned to scan for other-dimensional signals and anomalous ripples or tears in space-time, making it a very useful tool in deciding where to point the Stan O’ War II next.

It had been malfunctioning. At least, that’s what he’d thought the first time the signal appeared, a momentary blip somewhere on the Northeastern coast of the United States that disappeared just as quickly, taking all traces of its existence with it. The system hadn’t even seemed to register that it’d been there at all. The second time it had happened, maybe a month later, he’d asked Fiddleford to take a look at the satellites and confirm that there was nothing amiss with them. The third time, he did it himself and found nothing wrong, finding that the scanning strength in that area was strong and unwavering.

The fourth time the small dot popped into and out of existence in the exact same area, he realized that it wasn’t an error.

After that, the weak signal, always brief in its occasional appearances, flickered onto the interface once every week or so before vanishing again, never leaving a trace in the system no matter how he fine-tuned the code. The thing, whatever it was, was random and fleeting, and he couldn’t get a lock on it to save his life. His inability to find a pattern in its sporadic existence (let alone properly get an exact location on it) left him somewhere between intrigued and annoyed.

Screw it; it was maddening.

After a month (thirty-five days, not that he was counting) of watching, waiting, and tweaking the system, the signal finally seemed to stick, the small pinprick of light blazing to life on the display and staying there, GLADOS delivering him the exact coordinates within seconds.

He’d charted a course immediately, and they arrived less than a week later.

The location is an unassuming beach just along the southern coast of Maine, white sands of the shore giving way to pine and birch forest just beyond, an imposing cape jutting out into the sea before curving around and creating a small, shallow cove. That small ring of beach, where the high-noon sun reflects off the red and brown strata of the rock wall encircling them and casts the recess in a reddish glow, is where he and Stan decided to beach the boat, cutting the engines, running it ashore during low tide, and anchoring it in place. From there, they didn’t have to go far along the beach to find the beaten trail through the brush, leading deep into the forest where sunlight dapples through red and yellow leaves and fallen pine needles crackle underfoot.

A trail means people routinely come through this area, and that might indicate a nearby house or town where they can investigate and ask questions, maybe find some answers.

“Should be getting close,” Ford mumbles after about fifteen minutes of walking, glancing down at the device in his hand. The LCD screen flickers and distorts, the two dots representing their location and GLADOS’s approximation of the anomaly location jumping all over the screen, blinking on and off through dense static. He grumbles and whacks the device with his free hand a few times.

“Hey genius,” Stan says from a few feet behind him. “I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure hitting it won’t make it work better.” Ford huffs, hitting it one more time for good measure and scowling at it when the screen goes completely dark and stays that way.

_Even GLADOS started acting up the closer the boat got to land, so something must be interfering with the signal._

He shoves the handheld into the side pocket of his backpack, deciding he’ll run more tests if they end up going back to the boat tonight. It must be related to whatever made it so difficult for him to pin down the location of this place. Maybe.

_Might be a long-range EMP masking this location. Then there’s always the people of Dimension 04 &7 that could telepathically manipulate radio signals, so this could be something similar. Or the anomaly could be something trapped between dimensions, which would explain its irregular signals and possibly the interference, but not why GLADOS kept losing it. Perhaps—_

“Hey! Earth to Sixer!”

Ford blinks, Stan’s words shaking him out of that spiraling train of thought and bringing him back to the present.

“Sorry, Stan,” he says over his shoulder. “What were you saying?”

“Just that it looks like the trail is widening up ahead, right?”

Ford brings his attention back to the trodden path, and sure enough, the trees bordering either side of them seem to open up further along, the forest undergrowth thinning and receding along the edges and gradually separating as the path leads up to a bend, revealing more and more blue sky through the parting branches. It’s a gradual thing, something he’s not surprised he didn’t notice while lost in his thoughts. But now that he sees it, he finds his feet moving just slightly faster, an edge of anticipation taking over as he questions what might be just around that next turn.

“If you start running, I swear I will let whatever monster is up there eat you,” Stan pants from behind. “Could you slow down a little?”

“Or _you_ could speed up,” Ford sing songs. “Come on, Lee. I know you’re as curious as I am.”

“I haven’t had enough coffee in the last week to be sufficiently alive, let alone curious.”

“It’s not my fault you made a bet without checking the facts yourself.”

“Sorry for thinking I could trust my own _brother_.”

 “You should know better than to think I would so carelessly risk such precious coffee rations without some sort of insurance.”

“If ‘insurance’ is what we’re calling lies now-a-days, sure. I’ll remember to have ‘insurance’ the next time you—would you _slow down_ already?” Ford glances back, and Stan has already fallen behind a solid few yards, his shoulders hunched forward and his hands gripped on his backpack straps as he tries to keep pace.

“I’m not even going that fast!” Ford exclaims, though, with a groan, he relents and slows down ever-so slightly.

“Well, I’m tired and caffeine-deprived, so deal with it Sixer,” Stan says. “Your stupid dot hasn’t so much as flickered in almost a week. It’s not going anywhere.”

“We hope,” Ford mutters. It’s true, that part of him is desperate to quickly find whatever this anomaly is in case it decides to blink out of existence again. Thus far, this particular blip has been unpredictable and far more volatile than any they’ve dealt with before, and the fact that it stuck all of a sudden is almost just as bizarre. He doesn’t trust it. He’s all too familiar with the fact that just because something is stable now doesn’t mean it will be forever, and he wants to find this thing before the other shoe drops. And if they wind up missing it by just a few seconds, he’s not sure what he’ll do.

_If only Stan could be convinced to move a little faster…_

An idea slides into place, almost too smoothly.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says, spinning around to walk backwards and face his brother. “If you can get around that bend before I do, I will give you back the rest of your remaining coffee rations for the wee—”

He’s never seen Stan move so fast.

Before the words are even out of his mouth, Stan is gone, running past him as if the undead or the Devil himself was chasing on his tail, dirt kicking up in his wake in a ridiculously comical fashion, rounding the far-ahead bend in a matter of seconds. Ford is left standing in the middle of the path and gaping after him in absolute shock as the kicked-up dirt settles back on the ground.

It was certainly not what he had been expecting. He still blinks a few times to make sure it actually happened, pure reason insisting that Stan never moves that fast for _anything_.

“Huh.”

He makes a mental note to use coffee rations as incentive more often if these results prove to be replicable.

With a quick shake of his head to expel the last of the shock, he picks up a light jog to catch back up to his brother, whom he is sure is just around that bend, probably with his hands on his knees and completely winded after that little stunt. Even if he just lost his extra coffee rations, Ford is damned and determined to not be the one left behind, especially not after all his ribbing at Stan earlier.

It’s not even a mere few seconds after he starts jogging down the path that he slows to a walk, confused by Stan suddenly walking back from around the bend. Well, that doesn’t surprise him so much as the manner with which he does it. Ford would expect a victorious strut, mocking laughter, maybe a jibe or two along the lines of “who’s old now?” or the like. But instead, Stan comes around the corner with his face twisted in annoyance, his fists clenched on his backpack straps and his boots stomping on the ground with every step, muttering something to himself that’s too quiet for Ford to pick up from this distance.

“Stan,” Ford calls. “What is it?”

“We’re not going in there today,” Stan yells back.

“Pardon?”

“I said, we’re going back to the Stan O War because I refuse to walk into that town today.”

“So it _is_ a town!” Ford says, perking up at the confirmation of his theory. “Stan, we have to go investigate! Something in there is throwing off some weird signals, and we have to find out what it is before it—” Stan, having covered the distance between them, walks past his brother, grabs him by the loop of his bag, and hauls him backwards, making him stumble. “Hey!”

“I said not today,” Stan says, dragging him along despite Ford’s protests and tugging. “We’re coming back tomorrow when all this Pioneer Day shit blows over.”

“Pioneer Day?” Ford asks, confusion pausing his struggles for a moment.

“Yeah, Pioneer Day,” Stan says, still hauling Ford back up the path. “Gravity Falls does the same crap every year. It’s horrible. They doctor the town up to make it look all old-timey, everyone acts stupider than usual to celebrate the town founding or something, it’s the worst. I don’t wanna deal with it, so we’re coming back tomorrow.”

“But—”

“Tomorrow!”

Ford gives one last struggle, but Stan’s iron grip on his bag is unyielding. It leaves him with no other choice; he unclips the front strap of his backpack and frees himself, stepping away from Stan and towards this supposed-town. Stan wheels around, Ford’s bag swinging freely in his hand, his eyes squinted in annoyance.

“We’re going today,” Ford says, his feet planted in the middle of the path and his arms crossed in defiance. “I’m not going to risk losing this one just because you don’t like some people playing dress-up. I’m telling you, this is too important.”

“And I’m telling you,” Stan says, his gaze level, “that Pioneer Day is the one thing I can’t stand more than teenagers. I’m not stepping foot in that town ‘til tomorrow.”

“Then I’ll see you tonight back on the boat,” Ford says, turning back towards the town and making his ways back before Stan has the chance to argue. He may not have any of his supplies, but he’ll have to make due. He’s not backing down on this. He’s been tracking this anomaly for too long to simply wait another day. If Stan doesn’t understand that, then he can just—

“Hey Sixer,” Stan yells from behind him. “You left your journal on the boat, right?”

Ford freezes mid-stride. Usually a heavy weight in his inner, hand-sewn breast pocket, his new journal is notably absent today, the reason being that he hadn’t had a chance to water-proof the pages he added in last week and thought it safer to leave the gray-bound book on board for the day. He cocks his head back a bit.

“Perhaps,” he says over his shoulder, his tone laced with caution. “Why?”

“No reason,” Stan says flippantly. Ford all but knows there’s going to be a threat hidden in the next words. “I was just considering which random page it would be fun to add a spelling error or two onto. Probably in ink.”

Something coils in Ford’s stomach, dread sinking into his chest like a stone as he whirls around to face his brother head-on, meters separating them.

“You wouldn’t.”

A smile born of the Devil himself curls at Stan’s lips, the implied threat suddenly reading as more of a horrific promise than it did moments before.

“Try me.”

* * *

For as long as he can remember, Stan has always been a light sleeper. The quietest sounds from the next room over, the slightest vibrations through the floorboards and up his bedposts, the barest flash of light across his closed eyelids, most anything is enough to thrust him gracelessly back into the waking world.

Back when he and Ford were younger and the world was simpler, Ford would get annoyed when Stan would ask him to put his book down for the night and go to bed, the sound of the flipping pages and the wobble of the flashlight enough to prevent him from getting more than a moment of sleep at a time.

During those years when he spent many nights sleeping in his car on the side of the road, the crunch of gravel and the glow of headlights would quickly alert him to a car pulling up behind him. The extra moments of wakefulness gave him time to come up with an excuse for a cop, or in the event that it was someone less than friendly, enough time to start the engine and gun it out of there.

When he first started living in the Shack, every creak and groan of the house settling at night was something to fear. Some beast or cryptid that wandered inside or someone from his past that finally found him and came to collect. Sleep was elusive those first few weeks, for more reasons than he could count.

Even after his hearing started to go, he could still feel the _thump_ of little feet resonating through the wood flooring, the muted pound of footsteps letting him know that the twins were awake and as active as ever. Or there was the rare occasion that confused voices or child-like laughter would filter down through the concrete elevator shaft and into the basement below.

Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, he has no idea. But if he’s being honest, it’s probably a bit of both, and he’s never been one to question it. Sure, it can be annoying, but it’s also saved his skin more times than he can count, so who’s he to complain?

He tries to keep that in mind when Ford’s pacing footsteps out on deck wake him up for the fourth time that night.

He really _really_ tries.

Unfortunately, _trying_ only gets him so far, and it certainly doesn’t get him any sleep.

With the loudest groan he can muster, he flips over onto his side and folds his pillow over his head, the cotton-filling muting the last of the noise. He knows it’s ultimately useless, though. His brain, in its infinite annoyingness, knows that the _thump thump thump_ ing hasn’t really stopped and spends the next few minutes convincing him that he isn’t allowed to sleep yet. It swears he can still feel the micro-vibrations of each step rattling through the hull of the boat, like miniature earthquakes shaking his bedframe. It’s not even too long later that he swears he can still hear it too, the thud of each perfectly in-time step jabbing at his ears. It steadily gets louder and louder, a crescendo that just keeps going until he’s gritting his teeth against the echo in his head that he knows is just his imagination because his hearing is _definitely_ not that good without his hearing aids.

With another groan, he gives up, flopping back onto his back and releasing the pillow, his hands falling to either side as he stares up at the bunk above him and lets his ears readjust to the white noise filling the cabin, already dreading how exhausted he’s going to be tomorrow. At least now he can look forward to a steaming cup of Joe to wake him up a bit, if that’s any consolation.

_Hold on. Why is it so quiet?_

After a moment of listening, he’s pleasantly surprised to find that Ford seems to have stopped pacing, the room completely silent for the first time in hours. He smiles, closing his eyes and settling back under the covers, burrowing into their warmth and praying for sleep to claim him fast before—

A loud, shallow splash just outside snaps his eyes back open and forces him out of bed faster than his back would appreciate.

Leave it to his brother to get into trouble at two in the morning.

“Watch him get eaten by some monster,” he grumbles, blindly grabbing at his glasses on the counter and sliding them on as he rushes outside, shoving his arms unceremoniously into the first jacket he can get his hands on. “That’d teach him.”

Part of Stan expects to walk out into the middle of a battle, to find his brother throwing fists with some random local or a beach cryptid in the water. He’s ready for a fight.

What he’s _not_ ready for when he trips his way out the cabin door is the completely tranquil scene just outside, soft waves rocking the boat in the darkness of a moon hidden by the cliff surrounding them. It’s awfully quiet, and Ford is definitely not on deck anymore, which is concerning for the short moment before he circles to the bow of the boat and lays eyes on him.

“Ford! What the hell are you doing?” Stan yells over to where his brother has waded out in the knee-high tide waters, parallel to the main shoreline and about thirty feet towards the cove’s beach. Ford jumps a mile in the air and almost drops the small device he’s holding above his head, fumbling for a second and just barely stopping it from hitting the water. He turns back towards the boat, triumphant, before calling something back that Stan can’t quite make out, the words muddy in his ears. “Hang on!” he yells back, walking back into the cabin, popping in his hearing aids that had gotten left behind in his scramble to watch Ford get eaten by a sea creature, and coming back out. “What?”

“I asked why you’re awake,” Ford hollers back. “It’s late.”

“Your pacing isn’t as quiet as you think it is!” Stan says. “What are you doing in the water?”

“I’m trying to get a better signal!” He waves the device in his hand, as if Stan would suddenly be able to recognize whatever it is.

“In the _water_?”

“Yes, well, I ran out of room on the boat!” Ford says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Stan can only pinch the bridge of his nose to fight off the impending headache.

“Sixer, you’re going to get eaten by a sea monster.”

“I’m going to get eaten in water that’s one foot deep?”

“Knowing _you_ , yes. Now get back on the boat, because neither of us is going to be very happy if I have to come out there to get you.”

“Fine, fine, I’m coming back,” Ford says, waving Stan off and starting the water-logged trek back to the boat. “It’s odd though. I can’t get signal _anywhere_. Not even GLADOS can get in touch with the satellites anymore. It’s as if this entire area is just one big dead-zone for any and all radio signa— Wait,” Ford freezes halfway back, looking out towards sea and seemingly over the cape blocking them in. Stan glances over to where his gaze is pointed, but the steadily climbing cliff blocks whatever he’s seeing. When he turns back, Ford is wading backwards, closer to the main shoreline.

“What?” Stan asks. Ford pauses, cocking his head slightly to the side in confusion.

“Is that the moon?”

“I don’t know, genius. Is it a big bright rock floating in the sky?” Stan deadpans. In the darkness, he doesn’t have the clearest view of Ford’s face, but Stan doesn’t need it to know the exact, unimpressed look he’s surely getting right now.

“What I _mean_ ,” Ford huffs, “is why is it full?”

“You’re gonna have make a little more sense.”

“The moon is supposed to be a waxing crescent tonight,” Ford explains. “I’ve been keeping track so we can try to time those new-moon water faeries again.”

“Of course you have.”

“But that is _definitely_ a full moon,” he continues, pointing with the device out over the bluff, “which should be at least a week off.”

“Maybe you have the days wrong,” Stan shrugs. He’s almost immediately met with a glare that would rival Ma’s when they were young and would rough-house too hard while she was on the line with a customer. The familiarity alone makes him shrivel back. “Or not.”

“You see it too, right?” Ford says. “That is _definitely_ a full moon?”

“Can’t see it from here,” Stan says, again looking in the direction Ford is facing and only seeing the remnants of the moon’s light that clear the top of the bluff and none of the ginormous space-rock itself. It must be just behind the higher side of the cape that juts out into the water, and Stan assumes the boat is positioned at just the wrong angle to see it. “Ya know, big cliff is in the way. Though…”

“Though?” Ford repeats, and Stan can feel the man’s interest piquing from across the water.

“The stars look weird,” Stan says, squinting at the dark sky.

“The stars?”

“Yeah. They look sorta blurry, I think.” He squints harder at them, each star looking as if it was juxtaposed over itself and shifted slightly, the image not resolving itself at all no matter how he focusses. The effort hurts his eyes. “I think you might be right about me needing to get my eyes checked. This is some wicked double vision.” Stan faintly hears Ford mumble something to himself across the water, can practically smell the gears in his head turning from here, swears he hears the _click_ right as Ford opens his mouth.

“Does it help if you try looking at them with your head tipped to either side?” Ford asks cautiously.

“I don’t see why it—Oh!” Stan exclaims, amazed as his vision clears right up the moment he cocks his head to the side. “Yeah, that worked.” He tips his head the other way, the vision shifting in the middle and then re-correcting when his head touches his opposite shoulder. “Is this some weird anatomy-thing,” he does it again, “that I don’t want to know anything about?”

“Are you wearing your polarized fishing glasses?” Ford asks, ignoring his question all-together as his voice takes on a note of excitement. Stan blinks at him.

“I guess it’s possible I accidentally grabbed them in the dark when I got up,” he says slowly. “Why?”

“I need you to come here,” Ford blurts out, his excitement spilling out and turning his entire face into one beaming smile as he motions towards himself across the water. “If this is what I think it is, you’re going to want to see it for yourself.”

“I’m not getting in that cold frickin’ water, Ford,” Stan says. “No heckin’ way.”

“I’ll give you the rest of _my_ coffee rations for this week!” Ford says. Stan’s jaw drops so far that it must hit the deck. “You can have them all! I just _really_ want you to see this.”

“You’re serious?” Stan gapes. “All your coffee for the next three days? Along with mine? All I have to do is come look at the moon with you?”

“Yes, all of it,” Ford nods, slightly bouncing in place and causing ripples in the water around his knees, his entire being seeming to vibrate in excitement. “Just get _over_ here!”

“Fine, damn, give me a minute,” Stan says, already scrambling to get himself over the boat’s railing. The water is freezing when he drops in, splashing up to just above his knees as the shock locks him in place for a long second. But then he’s moving, sloshing through the water one step at a time, careful to make sure he doesn’t slip and fall on a rock or… whatever else is down there.

The moment he’s within arms-reach, Ford snatches the glasses right off his nose.

“Hey!”

Ford holds them up, pointing them at the big glowing circle in the sky that, without his glasses, Stan would have to assume is the moon, the vague circle of light just poking through two outcrops on top of the cliff. Wet sand squishes between his toes and his legs are starting to feel like ice cubes, but Ford doesn’t seem to feel any discomfort at all, his smile growing impossibly wider as he rotates Stan’s glasses back and forth.

“Care to share, Sixer?” Stan says, crossing his arms. “Or is this all just some joke to get me to die of hypothermia?” Ford plops the glasses back on his nose, the sudden clarity in sight taking Stan a moment to readjust to.

“Take a look for yourself,” Ford says giddily. Stan’s eyebrows draw together in confusion, contemplating the last time he saw his brother this excited and only coming up with the one time they came across that selkie off the coast of one of the Carolinas, and even that might not compare to the shear level of delight Ford seems to be exuding right now. He complies, glancing up—

“Okay, how does that look even fuzzier and… doubly-er than it did with my glasses off?” he asks, the bright white of the moon blurred and out-of-focus and beyond painful to look at.

“Tilt your head to the right,” Ford says. Stan does, and almost instantly, his vision clears and he finds himself looking at a very full moon, the dark spots and craters on its surfaces distinguishable in its light, the image as clear as anything else he normally sees when wearing his glasses.

“Yep. That’s a full moon,” he agrees, not-at-all impressed. If this is what Ford made him come out here for…

“Now to the left.”

“Then I’ll get my coffee for the…” he tilts his head and almost visibly flinches, taken very aback. “Huh. Okay, what the heck?” The moon, which was whole just a moment ago, suddenly shifts, the entire thing seeming to move partway to the right, the shape darkening into a, “…waxing crescent.”

“Bingo,” Ford says, and Stan knows the man is probably about to vibrate apart at the seams. Stan’s too busy considering what’s happening with the moon, slowly tipping his head side to side, watching the sky morph between the two different visions, like one of those optical illusions in those fancy picture books.

_Full. Crescent. Full. Crescent._

“So, what is it?” Stan asks, still shifting between the two in fascination. “Two moons?”

“Nope,” Ford says, and Stan finally breaks his trance-like state and looks over to meet his brother’s eye. There’s a gleam there, a certain look of open wonder and glee that reminds him of the boy forty years ago that wanted to see the world and everything in it, to know all there was to know and then some. It’s the same look that dared him to dream of adventure and freedom all those years ago, the one that almost makes him wish he could see the world the same way his brother must. “Same moon,” he says with a playfully devious grin, “but at two different times.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, obviously I was hoping to update once a week, and obviously that’s not going to happen... Lol. My schedule this summer got a lot rougher than I had anticipated (not necessarily difficult... Just busier). So, updates will most likely not be every week. I’m going to try for as often as I can (realistically every 2 weeks, at most 3 weeks). ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Also, ignore AO3's auto-numbering on the chapters... ~~It's killing me that there's no easy way to get rid of it.~~


	3. Chapter 2: Gazes That Linger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The one with an explanation, a bit too much staring, and some new... friends (?)_

“Okay. Now that I’m not half asleep, not freezing in the middle of the ocean, and have had my morning cup of coffee, explain it again.”

“The water was barely one foot…” Ford sighs, pushing up his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose in exasperation. “I don’t… Never mind. What didn’t you understand?”

“All of it.”

“Seriously?”

“You were too excited last night, and I was too tired,” Stan shrugs, stepping around a root protruding from the ground in the middle of the path. “It was a bad combo.” Ford lets out a long, insufferable sigh, and Stan can’t help but smirk in response.

Stan’s pretty sure his brother’s decision to relinquish his coffee for the week finally sank in this morning, the caffeine withdrawal rearing its ugly head and making him irritable from the moment he dragged himself out of bed. The glare he’d given his cereal bowl, as if it should be ashamed for daring to not be caffeine, was enough to have Stan doubling over with laughter. Even now, ten minutes into their walk through the pine and birch forest, the air still cool with morning dew, Stan continues to get a kick out of needling the man, skipping ahead and yelling back at him to “hurry it up old man!” every few minutes just to get a groan out of him. Or, better yet, taking the thermos out of his backpack pocket and taking a long drag of the still steaming, bitter coffee inside, his second cup of the day.

He knows he’s probably being a dick.

He’s definitely enjoying every minute of it.

Probably more than he should.

He takes another pointed sip of his coffee, Ford glancing over and scowling at him.

_Worth it._

“So come on,” Stan says, screwing the lid back on his thermos. “Out with the nerd stuff.”

“You really don’t remember anything I said last night?”

“I was half asleep.”

“So?”

“So, when I’m half asleep, half of my brain is sleeping, and the other half is _wishing_ it was sleeping,” Stan says. “You’re the smart one; you do the math.” Ford huffs, his gaze flicking momentarily down to the thermos still in Stan’s hands before he makes a quick grab at it. Stan just bats his hand away, securing the thermos in the side pocket on the opposite side of his bookbag and earning himself a pout from Ford.

“Do you at least recall what I explained about the Do-Over dimension?” Ford asks.

“Name sounds vaguely familiar,” Stan hums, digging back in the memory banks for anything else he can come up with regarding it. “That’s about it.”

“Okay,” Ford sighs. He reaches into his coat and pulls out his journal and a pen, opening to a blank page. “During my travels on the other side of the portal, I came across a dimension casually referred to as the ‘Do-Over Dimension’. There, time didn’t move straight-forward as it does here; it moved forward and backward randomly, often creating new and diverging timelines.” Stan sidles up close as they continue walking down the path, watching as Ford draws a straight horizontal line in his journal. “Let’s say this is the timeline. Now, in our dimension we’re used to time flowing forward only, which let’s say is left to right.” He slowly retraces the line left to right to emphasize this. “In the Do-Over Dimension, time can also flow backwards, or right to left.” His pen follows the same line backwards. “Now, often times, time would be rather unpredictable, moving forward or backward for random stretches of time, maybe moving forward for six months,” he traces forward from one edge of the line to the other, “and then back for two weeks,” he reverses direction, retracing a small portion of the line, “and then forward for five hours,” he traces forward the slightest bit, “and then backward for four months,” he traces all the way back to the start of the line. “Most species aren’t evolved enough to comprehend or manipulate the timeline when it moves in reverse, so for the vast majority, the backward movement in time would seem more like a jump,” he traces the pen forward on the line, then lifts the tip and moves it to a spot near the beginning of the line. “Most people retained their memories of the time they lived, but now they were suddenly back six months in the past, forced to live that time over again.” He glances over and meets Stan’s eye. “Make sense?”

“It’s a line, Sixer,” Stan says. “It doesn’t get any more straight-forward than that. Ha! Accidental pun!”

“I’m just going to ignore that.”

“Aw come on! That was a good one.”

“Now,” Ford continues unimpeded, “just because you moved back in time doesn’t mean you have to re-live the same life you did before. Maybe, on this timeline,” he traces the same line from left to right, “you ordered pizza and watched reruns of your favorite tv show for a week. But then time reverses,” he brings the pen back to the start. “Now, you decide, you want to go climb a mountain instead.” He draws a line that branches off the main one and runs parallel to it. “You have just created a new timeline. You go, climb to the top of some distant mountain, plant a flag or something, hooray. But then time reverses,” he moves his pen halfway back on the new branch, “and suddenly you’re only halfway up the mountain again.”

“Heh, sucker.”

“So, you’re halfway up the mountain, and you decide ‘to heck with this!’, and you climb back down. Congratulations,” he draws another branch coming out the top of that one, “you have just created another timeline. You live on this one for a few weeks, and, wouldn’t you know it—”

“Time reverses?” Stan asks.

“Time reverses,” Ford confirms, following the timelines all the way back down to the beginning of the very first line. “It reverses by months, and suddenly you’re back on your couch deciding if you want to watch reruns and order a pizza. And this is how you live, reversing and changing something every time, creating dozens and dozens of timelines,” he starts drawing multiple branches, each one breaking off and moving back, some shorter than others, some longer, some above the original line, some below it, covering half the page, “all of them running congruently and yet not, each and every one coexisting in the same time stream independent of one another yet still connected and innately dependent on one another.”

“Okay, you’re starting to lose me,” Stan says, what once made sense starting to shift into nothing more than words going in one ear and out the other. “The timelines all exist at the same time… even if you’re on a different one?”

“Yes,” Ford says, rotating the book so that the ends of the branching timelines all point downwards. “Think of it like a river.” He puts his pen tip on the beginning of the initial line, now at the top of the page. “You travel down the river,” he traces the pen downwards, “and even if you float down one of the arteries,” he diverts to one of the branches, “the other river branches don’t cease to exist. You just can’t perceive them because you are currently on this branch. And maybe a helicopter comes and picks you up and drops you back near the beginning of the river,” he moves his pen back, “and you wind up going down a different branch of the river delta this time,” he traces over a different branch. “The rest of the river is still there, including the stream you were previously on. You’re just somewhere different now.”

“Okay,” Stan says, tossing that around in his mind a bit. “I guess that makes sense. Sorta.”

“I mean, that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Ford says, lips quirking up in a small grin that Stan knows means he’s about to tangent. “You should hear some of the theories circulating that dimension, about how some think that timelines continue on even after a reverse, and it’s just a duplicate of yourself that went back or—”

“So what does all of this have to do with the fact that I could see two different moons when I tilted my head last night?” Stan interrupts him, knowing all too well how long it would take to get him back if he lets him traverse too far down those rabbit holes. Ford blinks.

“Right,” he says, blinking one more time before going back to the drawing. “Well, in reality, the timelines aren’t neat and linear like this. They’re sort-of a,” he motions vaguely in a spherical shape with his hands, seeming to search for the words, “big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff, I guess.”

“Wow, they just give twelve PhDs to anyone now-a-days.”

“You try to figure out a better way to describe it,” Ford snips.

“Yeesh,” Stan leans back. “Hit a nerve there. Sorry.” Ford squints at him, and Stan notices that the hand that had been holding the pen, the one closest to him, is currently out of his direct view. He swats in the general area behind him, not even remotely surprised to hit his brother’s hand that had been trying to casually reach over and steal the thermos of coffee out of his backpack pocket again. Ford yanks his hand back and grunts in annoyance, making Stan snort and ask incredulously, “Did you just grunt at me?”

“No,” Ford says, straightening his back and bringing the accused hand back up to the journal, Stan definitely not missing the red tint his ears have started to take on. “Anyways, time is actually a big mess, more like a ball of tangled string than a straight line like this.” He motions towards the drawing in his hand. “Unfortunately, that makes it very possible for a timeline to diverge and, say,” he draws a new branch off the main line and makes it cross through another branch, “intersect. Instances when this happened were collectively referred to as Overlaps. Now, just based on the vastness of the timestream and the general ordered-chaos of the universe itself, these Overlaps were few and far between. I think only two happened during my stay there, and they were apparently minor ones.

“But essentially, these Overlaps were exactly as they sound: an overlap of two separate timelines. They always manifested in one area, often times where the most significant differences in the timelines occurred, which made them predictable to a degree. Inside the overlaps, the area always took on the features of one of the two timelines, often whichever was the parent, or older, timeline. Due to this and depending on how close in time the two streams were, it was sometimes impossible to tell an Overlap apart from normal time. People would routinely pass right through them without even noticing, going about their day not knowing they’d just slipped into and back out of a completely different timeline. The Overlaps themselves were harmless enough, and they wouldn’t have been a big deal were it not for the fact that people in the middle of one during a time-reverse got erased from perceivable existence.”

“Um, what?” Stan chokes, freezing in place in the middle of the path.

“But like I said, they were very rare,” Ford waves him off, still walking. “And scientists in the dimension eventually discovered that the edges of the overlapping timelines had slightly interfering electromagnetic waves, and that certain finely-tuned polarized sensors could pick up on those EM shifts. Polarizers like your fishing glasses. So, if my theory is correct, we are currently inside of an Overlap of sorts, and you were able to see the edges of it using your polarized glasses, essentially looking between the edges of two different times.”

“Wait Sixer, back it up here,” Stan says, finally catching his brother’s attention and causing him to pause and turn around a few feet ahead. Stan tries to tell himself that Ford isn’t panicking, so maybe he shouldn’t be, but on the same token… “Can we come back to the fact that you said people would go in these things and disappear? Should we be, I don’t know, concerned about that?”

“Not at all,” Ford says. “It was only a problem in the Do-Over Dimension because of the fact that time would reverse and leave people trapped inside. Time doesn’t work like that here. We only have one singular timeline that must have crossed over itself somehow. We’ll have to investigate that while we’re here. I’d have to assume that something must have caused it, since I don’t see an Overlap of a singular timeline as something that can occur naturally. But that’s beside the point. There’s no way for us to get lost in a reverse since time only moves forward here, so we’re fine.” Stan breathes out a sigh of relief, having been completely ready to turn tail to run back to the boat and leave. He starts walking again, and right as he comes up Ford’s side, he swears he hears the man mumble something that sounds suspiciously like “I think”.

“What?” Stan asks in alarm.

“I said ‘oh look it’s where we were before!’” Ford rushes out, snapping his journal closed, tucking it back in his pocket, and picking up his pace. Sure enough, they do seem to have made it to the bend in the path where Stan stopped them before, having caught a glimpse of a Pioneer Day-decorated town and not wanting anything to do with it. He grimaces, glad he managed to help them avoid _that_ level of weirdness.

A thought occurs to him just then, one that makes his skin crawl.

“So you said that these things are caused by two different times overlapping, right?” Stan asks.

“Yes,” Ford confirms.

“Is there a chance that, I don’t know,” Stan says, “what I saw yesterday wasn’t just a Pioneer Day celebration and was actually—”

“Pioneer times?” Ford cuts him off, looking over at him with that excited grin. “That was the entire basis of the theory.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

“What if it was just the 1980s?” Stan reaches. “Maybe it was just a Pioneer Day celebration in the eighties. I would be okay with going back to the eighties. Music was still alright back then.”

“The odds of that are beyond slim,” Ford says as they come up on the bend, just about to round the corner where the town will come into view. Stan’s blood runs cold.

“Please just let it be the eighties,” he mumbles, a pleading prayer going out to whatever, if anything, is out there. “Please let it be the eighties. Please let it be the eighties. Please let it be—God damnit.”

* * *

There’s a science behind understanding science, a careful methodology created to allow you to straddle the line between fact and imagination all in an attempt to get humanity one step closer to unbridled and infinite knowledge. It’s being creative enough to ask the questions none have dared to ask before and then going out into the world of unknowns to find an answer. The entirety of the scientific method revolves around this, a desire to answer a question, no matter how strange or impossible.

Ford doesn’t understand how Stan never saw the appeal. The unknown was always calling to him, mysteries begging to be solved, the universe and all its answers just at his fingertips, nagging like a word on the tip of his tongue. How could Stan not feel that same pull, that same draw towards the truth? Ford’s view of the world is tainted by it, his perception colored by visions of “what could be”, questions of “how and why”. How could Stan be presented with the oddness and uncertainty of the universe and decide to just accept it? Ford almost has to wonder how the man sees the world, if his inclination away from rocking the boat too hard maybe leaves him better off in the end, living in the moment instead of chasing question after question with no real hope of finding a concrete answer. For Ford, the hunt is as maddening as it is rewarding, a constant hunger to know more and more, relentlessly chasing after the answers that are always two steps out of his reach. In the event that he manages to grasp some sliver of the truth before it bounds away again, it only causes more questions to rise to the surface, each more demanding of attention than the last until he’s ten cups of coffee into an all-nighter and amazingly no closer to the answer than before.

He couldn’t see living his life any other way.

Science, Ford knows, is largely based on the knowledge that you are probably wrong about everything you think you know, and that there’s nothing wrong with that. Hypotheses are created to be disproven, and sometimes the unforeseen outcomes of an experiment can prove more fruitful than the predicted ones. Being wrong isn’t the end of the world; it’s merely a beginning.

Bearing that in mind, there’s still something immensely satisfying about being right.

Or, at least, he thinks he’s right.

He’s not sure how many other reasonable explanations there could possibly be for an actual, honest-to-God pioneer town on the southern edge of present-day Maine.

Not one that’s this convincing, at least.

“God damnit,” Stan curses from off to his side. Ford doesn’t pay him any mind, his mind already buzzing with excitement and curiosity and maybe even the slightest bit of vindication.

The dense pine and birch forest gives way to blue sky up above as the path opens before them, curving very slightly and gradually widening to almost quadruple its original width within a couple hundred feet. That alone would be rather uninteresting were it not for the log cabins lining either side of said path and running the entire curved length. With stacked log and mud-packed walls, orange and brown tiled gable roofs, and stacked stone chimneys, the cabins are each held a few inches off the dirt by short stilts. Ford counts a total of nine individual houses, a couple with dark plumes drifting from their chimneys and giving the air a tinge of smoky sweetness. A gentle breeze drifts through the clearing, the chilly air carrying wisps of hush conversation from the ten or so people walking about.

Oh, and the _people_ …

Women with their hair up in white bonnets, wearing plain dresses with petticoats and dirt-smeared aprons and chatting on front porches or sweeping dirt out of the houses. A couple of men in dirty overalls and tall mud-caked boots with wide-brimmed hats on their heads hauling lumber back from the woods. Children hoop-rolling through the middle of the widest part of the path, their giggles and whoops of joy resonating through the peaceful air.

Ford could see how Stan’s first instinct would be Pioneer Day.

It’s exactly what it is, in the most literal sense.

Gravity Falls’ set-up must be pretty detailed to make Stan believe everything about this is just elaborate decoration.

It’s automatic, the way Ford already has his journal out and open again, his pen ready in hand even though he has no idea where to begin. There’s a woman on the other end of the clearing walking with a basket of what seems to be laundry on her hip, and Ford thinks he may have finally figured out where to begin the entry—

Before his pen can even come within an inch of the page, Stan grabs his arm and starts pulling him along the widening path, towards where that one woman with the laundry was coming from.

“Stanley!” he protests, immediately yanking his arm out of the grasp. “I need to document this!”

“I just want to figure out if your stupid time-smush theory is right so we can leave.” Stan’s hand moves to his shoulder, pushing him along. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“It’s just a bunch of quaint, old cabins. There’s nothing creepy about…”

They’re halfway to where the cabins meet forest once more when he starts to feel the eyes on him.

It’s a subtle, telling thing, one that his sleep-addled brain latched onto over thirty years ago and that he’s had trouble ignoring ever since. The prickle on the back of his neck, the primal fear of being followed by something that knows more or _is_ more than he. He knows better than most the feeling of being watched.

The people, who had been purposefully going about their day mere seconds ago, turn one-by-one to look at Stan and him as they pass. But it’s more than just a passing glance, Ford realizes.

They’re _staring_.

Ford doesn’t need to look at them to see the morbid curiosity, the blank fascination in their stares. He can feel it in the way the hair on the back of his neck stands on end when the two women chatting on the porch fall silent, when all the little bits of movement at the periphery of his vision go still, when the hoop the children had been playing with falls to the ground with a soft _thump_ , when the curtains in some of the cabin windows pull aside slightly.

The people, whoever they are, whatever year they are originally from, are watching them.

It’s unsettling, to say the least.

He knows better than to turn and acknowledge it. A diner back on Route 14 taught him that 30 years ago. He knows that turning and meeting the staring eyes only seems to make them more real, makes the itch in the back of his mind something more tangible.

Ford hates being watched. That’s one thing he knows for sure.

Stan’s hand on his shoulder tightens, pushing him a little faster, and he’s glad to increase the pace, his eyes locked straight ahead on the place where more buildings come into view further along the growing path and the people maybe aren’t—

“Hi folks, nothing to see here!” Stan announces out of the blue, and the suddenness of the shout makes Ford bristle. “Just two brothers passing through! Nothing odd! Just continue with your business and we’ll be out of your hair!” He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I told you this was weird.”

“There is no way you could have predicted this,” Ford hisses back.

“Heck no. These people are way creepier than I thought. So, we’re in agreement to get the hell out of here?”

“Not a chance.” He’ll readily agree that this odd turn of events was not what he was expecting, and while their experience here so far, no matter how short, has been quite off-putting, they can’t leave just yet. A hypothesis is useless without the experimentation to prove or disprove it, so Ford has some tests to run. Besides, even if his hypothesis is correct, it still leaves a lot of questions unanswered, like why GLADOS couldn’t seem to pin this place down or how this Overlap occurred in this dimension in the first place. Certain things just don’t add up, and he’ll be damned if he lets a few disturbingly curious pioneer people get the better of him.

Stan grunts, letting go of Ford’s shoulder and taking another sip from his thermos. Ford doesn’t think to make a grab for it this time, the air just a bit too tense for him to consider it.

“They’re probably just not used to seeing a guy this handsome come strolling into town,” Stan says with a half-hearted, almost-awkward chuckle, lightly elbowing Ford’s side once he puts the thermos back. “Left them speechless, huh?” Ford can spot his brother’s attempts at lightening the mood from a mile away, but he humors him anyway.

“I assume you’re referring to me?” he says.

“What makes you think that?”

They’re past the log cabins, trees and various undergrowth once again lining the sides of the still-widening path. No longer surrounded by the stares, Ford feels his shoulders relax just a fraction, an ounce of tension draining out. He can still feel their eyes following them, the prickle on the back of his neck subsiding but not going away entirely the further they walk away from the cabins and into what Ford realizes is the rest of the town.

“Because I’m pretty sure _I’m_ the one that people back in Gravity Falls called a ‘silver fox’.” Ford says.

“You’re never gonna drop that, are you?”

“The people have spoken, and they have decided that I’m the hotter twin.”

“I had to _explain_ to you what a ‘silver fox’ _is_.”

“And yet, that doesn’t make it any less true.”

Ford, out of some curiosity and nagging suspicion, glances back at the way they just came. The people are still watching, some having moved to a position where they can better see them without trees blocking the way, standing perfectly in place with that empty mesmerized expression plastered on their faces.

He tells himself to relax, that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. That there’s no reason to worry about people that are just _staring_.

“I’m pretty sure we were still twins the last time I checked,” Stan says. “That means, genius, that we look pretty much the exact same.”

“It’s the small things that make the difference.”

“Uh huh. Like what?” Stan asks.

“Well, for starters, my gray hair makes me look refined and wise.”

“Like a nerd. Go on.”

“Yours makes you look old.”

“Wow, going right for the kill with that one, huh?” Stan presses his hand to his chest in mock distress.

“You’re the one that asked.”

“Well, Mister Smart-Hair, at least I can actually talk to girls.”

“Societal convention has always been beyond me. That’s nothing new.”

“You have the weirdest ways of calling yourself a nerd.”

“Isn’t being a nerd in-style now-a-days?”

“Sounds like something a nerd would say to sound cool.”

“Says _you_.”

“Good burn, Sixer. Keep it up.”

Ford flips him the double-middle fingers, and Stan just laughs, nudging him as the path fully widens and they break into the clearing of what is obviously the town square. Some of the tension from minutes earlier has dissipated, and even though there’s still some lingering discomfort in the back of his mind, some feeling that he’s still being watched, it’s less pressing than before.

It’s in the moments like these that he’s glad he has Stan there to stand by him.

The town square is huge. Well, much bigger than it has any right to be. The square itself is just an enormous, wide-open space of loosely-packed dirt with six wooden buildings at its perimeter, two to their left, three to their right, and one all the way across the square in front of them. If the stocks in front of the first building on the left are anything to go by, it’s probably a jail. There’s also a somewhat small, oddly-shaped building on the far-right side that may be a weapons storage magazine, but that’s purely speculation. The same thought applies to the building directly across the square from them, which, as the biggest building both in height and width, might just be a town meeting house. The others he can’t be sure of, so he’ll have to investigate them himself later.

There are a few people here too, milling about the square, going about their business, whatever it may be.

He and Stan only have to take a few steps into the square before everyone, almost perfectly in unison, turns their heads to look at them.

They all share the exact same expression as the people back by the cabins.

It sends a chill right up Ford’s spine.

“Let’s keep moving,” Stan says. “You can do your science-stuff outside the town. This is too weird, even for me.”

“Agreed,” Ford says, spotting another small, worn path across the square. He nods in its direction, and Stan follows his line of sight. He lowers his voice so as to not be overheard. “We can head out that way, see what else there is, maybe come back here after dark when most of the people are hopefully asle—”

The door of the supposed-meeting house swings open hard and fast, jolting both men so thoroughly that they both jump a mile, Ford’s pulse skyrocketing with a sharp _thump_ in his chest. He swears he hears Stan yelp something about “Belgian waffles”, oddly enough, as the man grabs at his own chest.

Whatever spell seemed to have settled over the people vanishes instantly, every set of eyes turning away and going back to what they were originally doing, light conversations picking back up unimpeded, everything set back into motion as if nothing had happened in the first place. The tension in the air evaporates, leaving he and Stan standing in the middle of the square with their backs ramrod straight as the people resume ambling about. He even hears children laughing, and a quick glance behind shows the same kids from earlier running across the previous clearing once again, the hoop rolling across the ground as they chase after it out of view.

It’s like its own form of whiplash, the way that feeling on the back of his neck disappears almost entirely, leaving him wound up on residual paranoia and a lingering sense of oddness and nowhere to pin it to anymore. He’s not the only one, at least, Stan looking around just as confused as he is.

“What in sweet Moses just hap—”

“Welcome, strangers!”

Ford jumps again, having completely forgotten about the source of the noise that broke the trance to begin with. He turns his attention back to the man currently jogging towards them from the largest building, the stranger waving at them with an enthusiastic grin.

_Whiplash indeed._

Ford focusses on shaking off the lingering unease, smiling back at the first normal welcome they’ve received yet.

“Know I haven’t seen your faces around before,” the man says as he comes to a stop in front of them, his breath just a bit rough from the short jog. He’s about their height, lankier in build and much younger, a few soft creases around his eyes maybe putting him in his late thirties, early forties, if Ford had to guess. A few strands of dark hair poke out from beneath a wide-brimmed hat, and a pair of rounded spectacles rest on his nose. He holds out his hand to Stan, who gives it a raised eyebrow and shoots Ford a questioning look. He shrugs in reply, the man seeming harmless enough if not a touch over-enthusiastic, all things considered. “The name’s James. James Barnett. Most folks around here just call me Jimmy, though.”

“Stan Pinefield,” Stan says, accepting the firm handshake with the vaguest hesitance. Ford mentally notes the last name Stan went with this time. It’s become a habit of theirs, an extra measure to keep a bit of anonymity around the places they visit. He’s not sure he entirely agrees with the practice, but if it makes Stan feel more comfortable, then Ford will indulge it.

“And I’d have to assume you’re his brother?” the man, Jimmy, asks as he shifts his attention to Ford, holding out his hand once again.

“Unfortunately,” Ford says, returning the handshake. Jimmy laughs at Stan’s grumble, beaming at him in the most open and friendly way possible, further dispelling the lingering negative energy in the back of his mind. With such a strong handshake, Ford can’t help but recall those odd help sessions back in his college days that would stress “the importance of a confident handshake when making first impressions”, wondering distantly if this man would have made a better instructor. “My name is Doctor Stanford Pinefield, though most people call me Ford.”

“Stan and Stanford. Man, your folks sure had a sense of humor.”

“Something like that,” Ford smiles back.

“Well, I’d like to welcome you folks to our little town of Abbingdon,” he says, making a wide, sweeping gesture to the wooden buildings around him. “What we lack in size, we make up for in charm.”

Stan snorts ironically, squinting at some woman walking past with a basket of laundry on her hip even as she pays them no mind, continuing on her way towards the small path at the back corner of the square. Ford smacks Stan over the back of the head, earning himself a petulant yelp. “What? You were thinking it too!”

“Pardon?” Jimmy’s eyebrows scrunch in confusion.

“What my brother was so _tactlessly_ referring to,” Ford says, “is that upon entering the town, our initial welcome was very…” he pauses, not sure what the most delicate was to say “creepy” would be and not wanting to be rude, so he settles on, “uncomfortable.”

There’s a moment of terse silence, Jimmy looking utterly perplexed and Ford still willfully ignoring the last of that persistent tug at the back of his mind telling him that he’s still being watched. But the moment passes rather quickly, Jimmy’s expression shifting as he nods his head, as if in understanding.

“Did people stop and watch you coming in?” he asks. Ford, taken aback by how naturally the question is asked, can’t think of a response. Stan, however, seems to have no problem finding one.

“Is that a _common_ thing here?” he asks incredulously. “Because that was just plain _creepy_.”

Ford gets ready to smack him again, but Jimmy’s snort stops him.

“Yeah, I guess I should apologize for that,” he says. “We don’t get a ton of people coming through here, so any new faces are sure to attract some attention. I think the last new person showed up about…” He pauses, thinking for a moment before turning his attention to the side and hollering across the courtyard, “Hey Carter! We’re in October, right? Yeah?” He turns back, his voice returning to a normal volume. “Yeah, probably a year and a half or so ago. So, new people are a bit of a spectacle around these parts.” His eyes skim over them, one eyebrow quirking up. “Especially when y’all are dressed so… oddly. Where are you folks from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“We came in from the South,” Ford supplies.

“How far south?”

“About as far south as you can go,” Stan says vaguely. In the most literal sense, he’s not lying. Their most recent investigations had led them to the Antarctic to investigate some spikes in anomalous activity apparently caused by teleporting penguins with severe chromosomal mutations.

Ford highly doubts that’s the conclusion Jimmy comes to when his entire face lights up, pushing his spectacles back up from where they’d slid down his nose.

“Ah! So, you’re from Georgia!” he says. “I’ve always wondered what it’s like there! You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.”

“Oh definitely,” Stan says, nodding a bit fervently. Ford is pretty sure that Georgia is somewhere on the list of states that his brother is banned from. “Absolutely. For sure. But first—”

“Why don’t you give us the grand tour?” Ford says. “Tell us a bit more about this little town of yours? Anything odd? Strange? Peculiar?”

“Basically anything’ll make this guy happy,” Stan says, jerking his finger in Ford’s direction. Ford squints at him. “The weirder, the better.” And then under his breath, “That way we can get outta here faster.”

“Pardon?”

“I said: that way we can get outta your hair faster,” Stan says, and Ford can’t help but roll his eyes. “I‘m sure you have _tons_ of important stuff to do around here and all, like chopping wood, or, I don’t know, not getting dysentery or something.”

“Not at all,” Jimmy says, smiling. “There’s not much to do around here during the day. And besides, your arrival is much more interesting, to be quite frank. If you fellas are looking for crazy stuff, you’ve come to the right place.”

“Is that so?” Ford asks, raising a quizzical eyebrow. While their experience here thus far has proved… unconventional, if unsettling, he has yet to encounter anything that would be considered weird within the town itself (outside of the townspeople, of course). And if Jimmy’s charisma and general acceptance of this “crazy stuff" is anything to go by, does that imply that the absurd is commonplace around here? Are there anomalies outside of the time anomaly that brought them here, and could they be related to whatever caused the Overlap in the first place? Is it possible that the people are even aware of the Overlap? They’ve only been displaced for a week or so, maybe just over a month at most if the initial flickers on GLADOS were any indication. If they knew, Ford would assume more panic out of them, more relief at someone coming in from the outside. Not… _this_.

He can’t figure out what to make of it.

“Yeah. You should see some of the little men with pointy hats we’ve got running around here,” Jimmy says. “Real weird.”

_Or it’s just your normal, run-of-the-mill weirdness and I’m thinking too far into this._

“Oh, I’m sure,” Stan says.

“But we’ll get to that,” Jimmy says, walking off and waving them after them. “First, I’ll show you around Abbingdon.”

“Joy.” Stan follows after him, shoulders slumping as Ford lags behind a moment, sparing one more glance around.

There’s still that slight tingle on the back of his neck that he just can’t place the source of, that discomfort of one last set of lingering eyes. A quick sweep of the area lands his gaze on one person, leant up in the shade against one of the many buildings, face obscured by the shadow of the structure pitted against the glare of the sun. They’re slightly shorter in stature, probably male if the trousers are any indication. He makes what he would have to assume is eye contact, squinting into the sun and observing the person in return.

_You’re new in town. That’s all. Nothing weird._

The thought still doesn’t settle right.

He’s considering going over there and figuring out what the person’s deal is when—

“You coming, Sixer?”

He glances back and sees Jimmy still walking away and Stan paused and waving him along, still looking rather disgruntled about this entire turn of events.

“Yeah, I’ll be by in just a—” Ford turns back, but he’s immediately startled to find the person that had been standing there is gone, taking any trace of their existence with them. He spins around, looking for any sign of them, scanning faces and clothes of the few remaining people in the square, searching shadows and everywhere else, but whoever they were, they’re gone.

_That’s not spooky._

“I’m coming,” he says hesitantly, slowly turning back after one last, long look at the spot where the person was and trotting to catch back up to his brother and Jimmy.

The hairs standing on the back of his neck settle back down, and for the rest of the night, he doesn’t feel a single stare pointed in his direction.

* * *

 “It just _had_ to be a pioneer town.”

Stan kicks a random pine cone on the ground, causing it to roll out of the beam of his flashlight and off into the darkness.

“Couldn’t’ve been the eighties. It just _had_ to be the 1400s or whatever. Just my damn luck.”

After giving them a rundown of the entire town (which took the entirety of 15 minutes because the place is tiny, so of course it did), Mr. Mayor (yeah, apparently the Jimmy guy was the mayor of the place, and he was _way_ too humble about it if you ask Stan) managed to sit them down and chatter for _hours_ about anything and everything, telling them this and that about the weird stuff in town that amounted to little more than a gnome colony and maybe a turducken or two. All in all, nothing they hadn’t seen before.

Stan thinks he had been on the verge of convincing Ford to call it quits and head back to the boat for the night (and maybe never come back), but then Jimmy, the bastard, had started talking about some “event” that was going to happen, either tonight or tomorrow, being super cryptic and vague about the whole thing and giving no other details. And, the sucker that he is, Ford was reeled right back in.

Ford spent the next hour trying to get more information out of him, all while Stan sat back and twiddled his thumbs and wished he was anywhere else in the world. _Yeesh, he’d take a second date with Susan over this place._

In the end, Ford got nothing more that some mysterious mumbo-jumbo and an offer to stay the night in town instead of hiking back to the boat in the dark (because of _course_ the guy had kept them there past nightfall… of _course_ ).

Stan had barely gotten a word in edge-wise before Ford had agreed. They had enough supplies to spend a few nights (carrying essentials was a habit they got into pretty quickly after setting sail).

Except Stan didn’t bring one essential item.

“Place doesn’t even have coffee. What kind of town doesn’t have _coffee_?” He kicks something, a rock or maybe another pine cone, he’s not sure. Whatever it is, it sails into the bushes. “Stupid, old, pioneer town. That’s what kind.”

Ford had laughed at him for deciding to make the trip this late at night.

Had it not been for the fact that he’d won the extra coffee rations back, he probably would have just suffered without.

But he’ll be _damned_ if he lets this week pass before taking advantage of his spoils.

So, now he’s out walking along that tiny path through the woods in the dead of night, flashlight bobbing along with every step, the crunch of dirt and the occasional leaf under his boot the only sounds aside from the crickets and the steadily approaching lapping of the ocean waves in the distance.

_Stupid Ford, wanting to stay in town._

_Stupid town._

In that moment, he makes the executive decision that _he’ll_ choose the next adventure, and it’ll have all the babes and treasure he’s been missing out on for the past few months. Damn Ford and all his spooks and magic penguins and pioneer towns. He was promised girls and gold and he hasn’t been seeing much of either lately, a tragedy that _has_ to be fixed, pronto.

But first: coffee.

Something rustles in the bushes off to his left, startling him slightly out of his thoughts. He flicks his flashlight in that direction, skimming along the bushes in the general direction of the noise, his pace gradually slowing to a stop as he glances around. His flashlight beam just catches the flutter of leaves of a bush directly next to him as they rustle again. It’s more than the soft wind blowing through the path; there’s something there. The noise is pointed, loud, much more than any light breeze could do. He trains the flashlight on the bush, regarding it carefully as whatever it is continues to bumble about and shake the small branches.

He’s been through too much to be worried about whatever it is, especially since that Jimmy kid made it pretty clear that there’s not much out here that’s dangerous.

But a little caution never hurt anyone.

It takes another few moments for it to stumble out of the brush, the small bearded man on its hands and knees, its nose to the ground as it sniffs along, completely oblivious to Stan’s presence, its clothes in tatters and rags, its red hat dulled and torn in multiple places.

_Gnome. Of course._

Stan snorts, the noise seeming to finally alert the creature to his existence as its entire body freezes and stiffens.

“You little bastards really _are_ everywhere, aren’t ya?” Stan says, not really expecting an answer from it. He knows the little guys can talk, but back at Gravity Falls, all they ever really did to him was hiss and growl like wild cats. He expects it had something to do with all the portal energy all over him. That, and maybe the fact that he routinely whacked them out of his trashcans with a broom.

Either was possible.

The gnome is still frozen like a deer in headlights, intensely staring down at the ground. Stan takes a step towards it, shooing it with his free hand.

“Go on you stupid thing, get,” he says, waving at it. “Shoo.” He takes another step. “Last time I turned my back to one of you suckers, you jumped me and tore up my back real good, so your stupid little butt is gonna scamper off to your den or whatever,” another step, “before I—”

The gnome finally makes its move, and Stan’s ready for the hiss and for it to dart off into the night.

But that’s not at all what happens.

The gnome turns, its eyes wide with fear, the beam of light flashing inside its eyes and reflecting back like a wild animal’s.

And then it _screams_.

The shriek is loud and high and feral, making Stan’s hearing aids screech in protest and causing him to stumble backwards in surprise, his foot catching on something and sending him right to the ground with a yelp. There’s a moment of weightlessness as he falls before he lands in the dirt on his back, catching himself on his elbows and just barely breaking his fall, the impact shooting right up his bones.

He lays there for a moment, staring into the darkness ahead in mild shock, mentally trying to get his bearings again.

_That’s not what I was expecting._

_Little bastards never did_ that _before._

He almost has to wonder if there was something wrong with that one. Sure, there’s the Shmebu-whatever one back in Gravity Falls that only says its name, but he’s never had one… _scream_ like that before.

It was almost freaky, how absolutely terrified it had seemed.

He shakes off the disorientation, taking stock and realizing for the first time how dark it is.

Then the fact that his flashlight is off, and not in his hand.

“Shit.”

He scrambles onto his hands and knees, feeling around blindly, hoping he just accidentally bumped it off and dropped it when he fell. But there’s nothing in the area around him, his palms covered in dirt and leaves as he hopelessly feels around the ground surrounding him.

“Damnit Stan, ya really did it now,” he grumbles. It’s so dark out here that he can barely make out his hand on the ground a few feet in front of him. The moon isn’t doing much to help him either, its almost-nonexistent light partially blocked out by the trees. He fumbles a wide circle around where he landed, partially paying attention to his hands and partially listening for any sounds of that gnome coming back (he really hopes it wasn’t rabid), coming up with a big fat pile of nothing in both regards.

He’s about to give up his fruitless searching and just feel his way back to town in the dark (Ford’ll never let him live this one down) when a sudden white light pointing right in his face blinds him.

“What the—”

“Looking for this?” a voice, definitely feminine, asks. He shields his eyes from the beam of light, looking up at the source just as it flicks down to the ground in front of him, white spots dancing in his vision and obscuring any clear view he might have had.

“Ya know, I’d thank you for finding it if you hadn’t just blinded me, lady,” he says, brushing the dirt off his hands and then scrubbing at his eyes beneath his glasses, blinking away the blind spots.

“It’s not my fault this thing works weird,” she says, and Stan vaguely sees a hand reach out into the beam of light, probably an offer to help him up, if he had to guess. _Least she can do._ He takes her hand, and the girl hoists him up with ease, his feet stumbling slightly under him, his back screeching in protest to the sudden movement as he rights himself. He gives it a good stretch backwards, grunting when it pops and everything hurts a little less.

“So, what’s a girl doing out in the middle of the woods at this time of night?” he asks, giving her a quick once over in the backscatter of the flashlight. Shorter than him, but not by much. Dark hair, cut short and ragged. Younger adult, maybe twenties or thirties (they all look the same to him now-a-days, especially in the dark). Not wearing a dress like the rest of the gals around here, oddly enough. Pants and a coat and boots for her, it seems. And judging by the way she yanked him up off the ground so easily, she’s probably pretty built too.

“I could ask the same of you, old man,” she smiles.

“Watch who you’re calling ‘old’, kid.” He brushes the dirt off his knees. “I may be coming up on seventy, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still kick butt when I need too.”

“Sounds entertaining.” The light still pointing at the ground shifts as she holds the flashlight out to him, and he gladly takes it. “So, what did you say you were doing all the way out here?”

“I asked first.”

“The gobblequackens come out at night, so I’m seeing if I can find their new den,” she says.

“Gobblequackens?”

“Oh, you know,” she says, gesturing in front of her. “About _yay_ big. Tail feathers of a turkey, head of a duck, build of a chicken. Makes a really weird chirping sound.”

“You mean a turducken?”

“Probably,” she says with a shrug. “And what are _you_ doing out here?”

“Heading back to my boat to grab some coffee for the morning.”

“And you veered off-trail because…” she says, as if prompting him for a response.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“I mean, you’re about fifty yards deep into the woods off the main trail,” she says. “Did you really not notice?”

“No, that’s definitely not—” he sweeps the flashlight up and around, pointing along where the path would be to prove it to her.

But she’s right.

He’s not on the path anymore.

He’s surrounded by trees, brush covering the ground and obscuring any possible path, the sounds of crickets and rustling leaves surrounding him, crashing waves somewhere in the distance.

He definitely wasn’t _here_ a minute ago.

He… has no idea _where_ he is.

The girl, seeming to sense his confusion, speaks up again.

“I found you after I saw your light dropped in the middle of the trail back that way,” she motions somewhere behind her, “and heard you making your way through the brush. Figured I’d come out and find you in case you dropped it on accident.” _He dropped the flashlight and walked into the woods? He doesn’t remember…_

His head gives a hard, pained throb, and he recalls that this is exactly what happened when they left port a few days ago to come here.

_Once is an incident. Twice is a coincidence. What happens if it happens again? What is “three times”?_

_What is ‘it’ in the first place?_

_Is the memory wipe finally coming back to haunt me?_

“Hey, are you okay?” the girl asks, breaking him out of his thoughts. Realizing he’d zoned out completely, he looks back at her, her eyebrows scrunched together in confusion.

“Yeah yeah,” he says, shaking it off and shoving all the thoughts back into the back corner of his brain to worry about later. To figure out later. “Yeah, I’m just dandy.”

Right now, he needs to…

He needs…

He glances around, the trees and bushes all looking the exact same, nothing hinting as to which direction leads back to the trail.

_Hmm._

“Say, do you, um, know the way back?” he asks. She blinks, hard.

“Oh, yeah,” she says, pointing into the brush over her shoulder. “I’m not heading back any time soon, but I can take you back to the path.”

“Well then, lead the way, Miss…?”

“Em.”

“Miss Em.”

“Just Em,” she corrects him, starting to walk into the bushes. Stan follows behind, keeping the flashlight shining in her direction.

“That short for something?” he asks to her back. “Emma? Emily? Emminggale the Third? Emangeli—”

“Just Em,” she repeats firmly. “And barely that.”

“Alright,” Stan says, pursing his lips. As if _that’s_ not entirely cryptic and vague as hell. “So…” _Small talk. Small talk. What kind of things would Sixer ask?_ “You come here often?” He wants to smack himself as soon as the words leave his mouth.

“I’ve lived in this town for about three years, explored every inch of these woods as much as I can,” she says, casting a glance and a small smirk over her shoulder as she pushes a low-hanging branch out of her way. “So, yeah, I’d say I come here often.”

“Three years, huh?” he says, ducking under that same branch as she lets go of it. “See anything weird, odd, out-of-the-ordinary recently? Maybe something monster- or treasure-shaped?”

“Nothing much recently, no,” she says. “I mean, this town has its odd little quirks, which I’m sure you and your brother will find out about pretty quickly here, but nothing changed recently as far as I can tell.”

“You know I’m here with my brother?”

“Word travels fast around here, Stan. You and your brother are the hot gossip of the town right now.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, kid.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You wanna clarify what you meant by “little quirks” earlier?” he asks.

“No, not really,” she says. She smiles back at him again. “Wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

“Not a lot out there surprises me anymore, kid.”

“I don’t care what you think you’ve seen,” she says. “This will take the cake, guaranteed.”

“Does this happen to be the same thing Johnny boy was yammering about earlier?”

“You mean Jimmy?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Probably,” she says. “It’s tomorrow night, so the majority of the town is pretty excited.”

“And you won’t even give an old man a hint?” There’s a short pause, and Stan sees her cock her head, as if debating something internally.

“All I’ll say is that you better have your eyes on the town square around the time you hear three consecutive gun shots,” she says.

“That’s the same thing Jimmy told us earlier,” he says.

“It’s a pretty standard response.”

“You folks get asked it often?”

“No, not really, actually,” she says, glancing around. “We really don’t get new people here very often.”

“So I’ve heard. There a reason for that?”

“Does there have to be?”

“There usually is when there’s weird stuff inv—”

“Alright, here we are,” Em says, gesturing around and cutting him off. “Back on the path as promised. You’re welcome.” Stan skims the flashlight around the area, and sure enough, he’s back on the path now, tramped down dirt underfoot and spaced-out trees surrounding him. He couldn’t begin to tell if it’s where he was before, but it’s better than lost in the middle of the woods.

“Oh, yeah, thanks,” he says, turning back to face her. “It would’ve taken me forever to— and she’s gone.” Instead of being just off to his side like she was when he stepped out of the brush, the girl, Em, has just completely disappeared, not leaving a trace behind. The surrounding woods are silent, not even the snap of a twig or the crunch of a leaf giving away where she went. At least, not that his hearing aids can pick up. “Of course she’s gone. Makes sense.”

 _Is_ anyone _in this town normal?_

He glances around one more time, realizing again that he can’t remember which way he was originally coming or going from. It all just looks the same.

“Um, any chance you’re still nearby enough to tell me which was leads to the beach?”

No answer.

“Great.”

A few minutes of glancing between the two, he just winds up randomly picking a direction and going with it.

Twenty minutes later, when he winds up back in town instead of at the beach, he curses in about five different languages and then storms back to the room they’re staying in above the tavern.

Sleep, it turns out, is just a bit more appealing than coffee.

He’s sure he won’t think the same in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah so... it's been a while... and I don't have an excuse... So you can check out [this Tumblr post I made](https://pinesbrosfalls.tumblr.com/post/178619623626/my-a-matter-of-time-writing-schedule) if you wanna know why I haven't updated in a while, but long story short, I'm not setting a deadline for myself anymore.
> 
> This chapter was _definitely_ a bit of a doozy, especially when it comes to length (almost 9.5k... _Damn_ ). And there's a lot of new info to be sure. But don't worry dear reader, everything will be explained in time...
> 
> Also *throws some confetti* Look some OCs! So ~mysterious~...
> 
> Lemme know what you guys think down in the comments! I love interacting with you all! <3


	4. Chapter 3: Little Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The one with an early lunch, a "broken" compass, and an affront to mimes._

Sunlight blazes in through the bedroom window by the time Stan drags himself out of bed the next morning, socked feet dragging on the cold wooden floor and his back aching something terrible. He’s sure it’s from the lumpy old mattress that’s probably stuffed with either hay or rocks, if he had to guess. When he and Ford make that supply run to the boat today, he’ll have to remember to grab the extra strength Tylenol or _something_. The generic stuff they packed just isn’t going to cut it.

Ford’s bed is empty, which isn’t a surprise at all. The nerd is always up at the crack of dawn, not wanting to “waste the day away” or something along those lines. He’s sort of glad Ford left him to sleep, especially considering how late he came in last night after the failed coffee run. Though, Stan can’t say he’s looking forward to having to search the town for him.

He’s almost relieved when he trudges downstairs to the tavern, boots and beanie pulled on and coat zipped against the chill, and instead finds Ford sitting at a table and scribbling away in his journal, a bowl of barely-touched food off to the side.

“Thought you’d be out already,” Stan says as he plops down in the seat across from him. “Interrogating the locals. Solving mysteries. Probably doing math. You know, the usual.” Ford quirks a small smile, still intent on whatever he’s writing. Stan chances a peek and sees he’s working on a sketch of a man sitting behind a counter, rows of books lining the wall behind him, the man intent on something in his hands. A glance to Ford’s untouched food, and he takes the moment to snag the piece of bread off the top of the bowl of (what looks like) stew.

“Thought it tasted weird, so you can have it if you want it,” Ford says, motioning towards the bowl, not looking up from his sketching. “I’m planning on grabbing some food from the boat when I make that run today.”

“Am I not included in that boat-run anymore?” Stan asks, grabbing the bowl of stew (definitely stew) and sliding it across the wood table. Smells fine, if anything.

“Did you not get everything you needed last night?”

“Never made it to the boat.” Stan punctuates the sentence by spooning a glob of the meaty soup into his mouth. Ford’s right about the flavor being a little… weird. (And the meat, whatever it is, is a bit on the chewy side.) But he’s had worse, and he’s hungry enough to tolerate it for now. Ford pauses from his sketch and glances up at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Got lost,” Stan says, spooning another bite in. Then, with his mouth still full, “Some girl helped me find my way back.”

“Oh?” an eyebrow raised.

“Relax. She was, like, half our age. I’m not _that_ creepy.”

“I was more questioning why someone, let alone a young woman, was out and about so late.”

“Said she was looking for turduckens,” Stan spoons another bite, wondering if _that_ could be the meat in this stew, though this seems a bit gamier than he’d imagine a turducken would be.

“Hmm. Odd,” Ford says, absently tapping his journal with the back of his pen before flipping back a few pages. “Turduckens back in Gravity Falls usually only came out in the morning to forage for food. I’ll add it to the list of little general oddities in this town.”

He scribbles something on the page, and Stan peeks over and can barely make out a few phrases from his upside-down vantage point: “6-10 people per house…”, “dirt in main square loose and not tramped…”, “… line of stones… front of buildings”, “ _too sunny_ ”, etc.…

“Add ‘screaming gnomes’ too,” Stan says around another mouthful of food. Ford glances up questioningly as he jabs his empty spoon in Ford’s direction. “Really loud. Really freaky.”

“Is there a story behind that?”

The little voice in the back of Stan’s head (the one that for some reason sounds like some unholy cross between his Ma and Mabel) reminds him that he needs to address the little memory lapses. That he should bring them up to Ford so they can figure out what to do about it. That ignoring it won’t make it go away. That this is probably something serious and he shouldn’t be pretending like it isn’t happening because it definitely _is_.

“Maybe.”

“Does it have something to do with you getting lost last night?”

Something in his gut almost caves to that little voice and forces the truth out.

But then he thinks about how worried this will make Ford, and how he _knows_ he’ll want to leave immediately so they can go sort this out, and Stan _knows_ how long Ford has been looking for this place.

He can’t be the one to ruin that.

He can’t be the reason they have to leave. ~~No matter how much he may hate this place.~~

He shoves it all back down, electing to ignore it in favor of pretending nothing’s wrong and making both of their lives less stressful when this turns out to be nothing important.

_If it happens again, then maybe…_

“If I say ‘yes, the gnome had something to do with it,’ will you stop asking questions so I can preserve what little dignity I have left over the whole thing?” he says instead.

“Not likely.”

“Then no, not at all.” He takes another bite of stew, ripping off a piece of bread and tossing that in too. “Gnome had _nothing_ to do with it.”

Ford rolls his eyes, scribbles down one more thing on the “list” page, and then flips back to his sketch.

“Everything else aside,” Ford says, attention back on finishing his drawing, “I was planning on one of us making a run to the ship for the supplies, and the other person staying here to talk with the locals—”

“No way in hell,” Stan says. “You can stay here and talk to the weirdos. I’ve already got a short supply of functioning brain cells. I can’t afford to lose any more hanging around these people.”

“I mean, the plan _was_ for me to stay and you to go,” Ford says. “But then I realized I had to recalibrate half of the on-board navigation systems to account for the polarization shift inside this Overlap, and then run a few tests to confirm that it was as stable as I had originally—”

“Stop!” Stan holds his spoon up to silence him. “How many buttons would I have to press?”

“At least 26,” Ford says. “And then after collecting some data, you’d have to run it through a couple specialized filters to clean out the noise created by the space-time interference and—”

“Geez, fine, I’ll stay here,” Stan sighs. He slumps dejectedly in his seat. “Can’t believe you nerdi-fied what was supposed to be the highlight of my day.”

“I can’t believe that you hate it here enough that you’d rather _hike_ than get information out of people.”

“I’m a man of many mysteries, the least of which being how much I hate old-timey towns.” He scrapes at the bottom of the bowl to get the last bite and pops the last bit of bread in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “So, where exactly have you been already so I don’t waste my time talking to the same people?”

“Well, this morning, I mostly spent time in the town library.”

“Oh, thank Bunyan. I won’t have to go, then.”

“It's really quite fascinating. They only have a few actual books. Some basics, like The Old London Primer and The Legend of Tired Concavity and The Lewis and Clark Expedition.”

“Clewis and Lark,” Stan corrects him. Ford pauses his scribbling, his eyebrows scrunching and his eyes glancing to the side in thought.

“I thought that was a typo,” he says. “You’re sure it’s not the other way around?”

“Positive,” Stan says. There are very few things that he can specifically remember from school, never mind his childhood. But a story about two buddies out exploring the unknown and adventuring? Yeah, that stuck pretty well.

“Hm. Well, as I was saying. There are a few books, but the majority of the library is made up of journals that the townspeople seem to have written over the years, and they have this system for tracking them and checking them out--”

“Yeah yeah, anything else?” Stan asks.

“I also spoke to Jimmy again about this so-called “event” tonight. He still isn't saying much, but I think you could probably get more out of--”

“He’s not gonna say anything.”

“You don't think so?”

“Not at all.” Stan leans back in his chair, the wood creaking. “The first guy to smile at you never has pure intentions. I don't think he'll spill. He seems to like his drama. But I can poke if you want.”

“Just give it your best shot. I mean, worst comes to worst, I guess we'll see tonight,” Ford grimaces, absently tapping the back of his pen on the journal pages. “I just hope we haven't stumbled into another cult situation. That was a bit awkward the last time.”

“Just a bit,” Stan says dryly, remembering clear-as-day that night they stumbled into the middle of a ritual in the woods run by a bunch of college kids trying to bring a fictional character from some tv show to life. Stan’s still pretty sure Ford was more offended by the fact that they were doing it in the name of his favorite tv shows from back in the day and less so about the blatant misuse of actual honest-to-god magic. He’s still hesitant to put on any episode of _Space Trekkers_ after the incident.

“Aside from that…” Ford spends a few more minutes relaying everything he accomplished this morning, apparently having talked to a few more of the residents of the town and getting a small tour of one of the houses they passed on their way in. He starts rambling about some of the structural foundation of the houses, and it only takes a few seconds of _that_ before Stan’s mind travels elsewhere.

Townspeople have started to slowly filter into the room, a few of them scattered around at different tables, quietly talking to one another, occasionally glancing in his and Ford’s direction. The inn keeper (Stan can’t remember her name for the life of him, young girl, a bit heavier-set than most other people here, but that doesn’t really say much) occasionally emerges from some back room he’d have to assume is a kitchen, bringing people bowls of the same food he’d just eaten, stirring up some small talk and laughing with the people. They all seem harmless enough, he can’t help but think. Sure, the occasional staring is a bit weird, and he’s not sure he’d _trust_ anyone here, per say. But none of the people have done them any harm yet, something he’d been only vaguely concerned about sleeping in town last night.

If pioneer towns weren’t just annoying on principle, it probably wouldn’t be _so_ bad here. Tolerable, at the very least.

He still doesn’t want to be here.

_Beaches and babes and treasure? More like boring with a measles outbreak just waiting to happen._

Ford’s still rambling on about the fact that the houses are built on stilts, though Stan has no idea why that’s even _remotely_ important. But he’s still going, and he would almost be impressed with how much Ford had gotten done in these few short hours had he not _still been going on and on about the stilts_ —

“Okay okay I get it,” Stan cuts him off, Ford stopping with his mouth comically open mid-word. “You can tell me more tonight, alright?” _While I’m lying in bed pretending to listen but actually sleeping_.

“You’re right,” Ford says. “There are more important things to get done today while there’s still daylight.” Stan groans, realizing he should have just let him ramble. “Anything you need from the boat?”

Stan lists off a few things, his back twinging when he mentions the extra strength pain meds, as if the pain were announcing its presence once again. He throws in his back pillow just for good measure. After that, Ford suggests they meet back here in two hours to share their findings. He then proceeds to sync their watches down to the millisecond (because his brother really is _that much_ of a nerd, isn’t he) before heading off, leaving Stan alone in the inn.

“You know,” a voice says from somewhere over his shoulder not even a moment later, nearly making him jolt out of his skin. But it’s just the innkeeper girl, grabbing the empty stew bowl off the table. She barely spares him a glance. “If you’re looking for somewhere weird, I know a place you might just want to take a look at.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” she says. “Unless, that is, you’re afraid you’ll lose one of those precious brain cells of yours while I tell you the directions.”

If he’d been drinking a glass of water, Stan’s sure he would have just spit it out on the table right then in surprise. Instead, he coughs awkwardly into his hand, his face flushing warm.

“You heard that?”

“’Course. I hear _everything_ in here.” She winks suggestively, as if she’d just told some stellar joke, though he has no idea what the joke was supposed to be. Unless _he’s_ the joke, but he guesses he’d deserve that. He smiles nonetheless, hoping to speed up this awkward little exchange. It seems to do the trick, because she continues, “Now, you’re gonna wanna head up the path to the stream…”

* * *

The tide didn’t roll in as high as he thought it would, a fact that Ford is more than thrilled about considering he only got soaked up to just below his hips on the trudge out to the boat. He’ll still have to change, but it’s better than the swim he thought he was going to have to take. As soon as he climbs on-board, he tosses his shoes (bone dry, because why ruin a good pair of boots when he can just take them off for the wade over) and supply bag onto the deck and immediately switches to dry pants, not wanting to deal with dripping water everywhere for the couple hours he’ll be here running tests.

First thing’s first, he gets the polarization recalibration going, adding a corrective measure into GLADOS’s satellite communication transceiver to account for the Overlap and setting it to run through all possible Brewster polarization angles to find the best signal, allowing it to iterate while he gathers supplies.

_Child’s play, really._

It takes only a few minutes to grab everything they need for another night in town: Stan’s extra strength pain medication, a change of clothes for the both of them, some of those homemade daily-nutrition granola bars that he learned to make in Dimension Y8p<, some AA batteries for the GLADOS handheld device (he makes a mental note to get more batteries at the next port, as it seems they’re running low), a couple extra pens, Stan’s orthopedic back pillow, and a few other odds and ends. It’s enough to fit in a small drawstring handbag that he figures he can just throw over his shoulder on his way out.

He may also spend a few minutes looking for Stan’s new coffee hiding spot, but that’s inconsequential.

Well, alright, it’s more than a few minutes. But the boat is only _so big_ so he’ll find this new spot eventually. It’s just a matter of searching.

Not that he’s had any luck thus far. The current spot has been stumping him for _months_.

He’s almost considering _really_ making a fool of himself and laying down on the ground to tap around for any loose floorboards. However, before he can decide whether he actually has so little self-respect left to resort to that, GLADOS chimes, alerting him that the calibration is done.

At the main terminal computer in the back of the cabin, he runs a few quick tests of the final calibration and…

The results are, well, _wrong_ to say the least. The calibration is completely off, the positioning marked on the screen flickering and jumping entire continents for no apparent reason, seeming unable to lock onto a signal at all. But that… doesn’t make any sense. He’s gone into Overlaps before and sent signals through them, calibrating the polarized interference using this exact method.

This should _work_.

He starts the calibration again on the odd chance that it was just a bad data set, running off to set up some other instruments to get more readings.

It’s while he’s setting up an ultraviolet spectrometer on the deck of the boat that he happens to glance at the navigating compass mounted by the boat’s wheel. It’s a quick glance, but it’s one that makes him do an immediate double take. The needle, which should be parallel to the shoreline and pointing towards the back of the boat, is instead pointing towards the surrounding bluff and out to sea. He pauses, giving the device a couple light taps on its glass face, and then a few harder taps when the needle still doesn’t correct itself. But it doesn’t so much as wobble, rigidly pointing in the East-Southeast direction. He finds the same thing when he digs his handheld compass out of the bottom of his travelling bag, the needle fixed in the exact same direction.

“That’s odd,” he says to himself. He gives his compass a solid shake, but the needle stays pointed perfectly at the same spot. _Is there a chance we translated not just through time, but also through space?_ “No, that doesn’t make sense. Overlaps are folds in time, not space. A fold in space would be catastrophic for space-time.” _Could true magnetic North be shifted inside this Overlap?_ “Even accounting for the shift of Earth’s magnetic field over time—” _it wouldn’t have moved enough to cause this extreme of a difference._ “Something has to be giving off enough magnetic interference that it’s overpowering Earth’s magnetic field.” _But how could that be possible? And where…_

He looks back out to where both compass needles are pointing, at the cliff that curves out into the sea and creates the cove they’re currently anchored in, the orange and red striations in the rock face brightened by the high afternoon sun.

“Huh.”

* * *

By the time Stan makes it back a little over two hours later, the inn’s tavern has completely cleared out. According to the inn keeper (whose name, Stan has learned, is Minnie), he and his brother had left right around the beginning of the lunch crowd, and that the dinner crowd would be coming in around five or six.

Stan asks her a few questions, about the town, about her, about some of the locals. Apparently, this place used to be a pretty convenient rest spot along certain small trade routes up the coast until people inexplicably just stopped coming one day. Since then, she says the town has grown remarkably self-sufficient, _thriving_ even, though she noticeably doesn’t elaborate on how. Stan has to wonder if it has something to do with the Overlap that Sixer was talking about, though that explanation doesn’t quite feel right. He’ll ask Ford tonight.

Minnie chats on, all the while wiping down the tables in the tavern and around where Stan’s sitting, telling him some of the local gossip (most of which seems pretty tame by his standards, ranging from someone being pregnant to work starting on another cabin in town). She’s a spunky kid, he’ll give her that much. She moves around the space with a practiced ease, almost talking just for the sake of talking, laughing at her own jokes and handing him a rag to give the table he’s at a quick wipe down (he protests until she offers him an extra chunk of bread with dinner).

He asks about the mayor, getting no more insight into the guy’s head from her answer than he would expect. And when he asks about the girl from the woods last night, Em, he just gets a laugh and a promise that “she’s a bit of a nut, but you folks would probably love her” and nothing more. Just like Jimmy, though, when he asks about the “event” tonight, he gets just another head shake and a warning to “wait and see”, which still rubs him the wrong way, even coming from her with a bright smile.

He’d be lying, though, if he said he wasn’t saving the best question for last, waiting to gage her reaction to some easier questions before broaching the… hard one. She seems open enough, though, so when Stan goes to ask her about what he found out in the woods, the thing she pointed him towards, she goes… oddly quiet.

And then proceeds to excuse herself to the kitchen to check on whatever she has cooking.

Which is… not the reaction he had been expecting at _all_. He’d expected excitement, or hell, even another promise for answers at a later time, like with the “event”. But all he got was silence.

_That’s what you get for trying to figure out pioneer people, Pines._

That was about twenty minutes ago, and while he still hears the occasional _ping_ ing of pans and cooking utensils from the back room, he’s completely alone now, left to stare at the wood and mud-packed walls of the cabin.

It’s almost an hour past the agreed meeting time when Ford finally bursts into the tavern, that manic glint in his eye and huge smile on his face all too telling. _He found something._

“You’re late,” Stan says, and after getting another look at him, “and wet.”

“Didn’t have time to change my pants again,” Ford says, shoes squelching with every step as he all but rockets over to the table Stan’s at. He would say Ford’s vibrating with excitement, but he’s pretty sure it’s more shivering than anything. It’s not freezing outside, but it isn’t warm either, especially in wet clothes. “You’re never going to believe what I found.”

“You may wanna go change first before you drip water all—”

“I was calibrating the satellite transceiver and couldn’t get it to work,” he barrels on, “so while I was investigating, I noticed the ship’s compass was not pointing North. And the same was happening to all the other compasses I could find! At first I thought they were all broken, maybe some freak magnetic wave or something. But then I realized they were all pointing in the same direction: at the cliff!

“So I hiked all the way to the top of the bluff, which was quite a hike, let me say, and the view was stunning, but that’s beside the point. And when I got up there, the compass I brought went _wild_ and started spinning, almost as if I’d encountered a magnetic pole! And then, on a whim, I aimed my magnet gun down at the ground, and it _instantly_ attracted downwards with enough force that I couldn’t pull it back without turning it off!”

“So, you found magnetic dirt,” Stan says.

“Of course not. That’d be ridiculous. I think that, somehow, there’s a remarkably huge iron deposit _inside_ the cliff. Which is extremely odd for a coastal area like this, but not unheard of. But for a deposit to be concentrated and large enough to have that _profound_ of an effect, let alone being _magnetized_. Unless of course it was magnetite, but I don’t see that being possible this far away from a volcano. So, really, it could be any ferromagnetic material, but with all the laterite clearly visible in the soil, I’d have to guess—”

“Laterite?”

“Yes. The orange and red striations in the cliff! I had assumed it was your standard clay, but if this really is an iron deposit, then I’d have to assume the red coloring comes from the deposit rusting, probably in the humid air, creating laterite. I could run more tests to be certain, but it would certainly make a lot of sense considering—”

“So,” Stan cuts him off, quickly digesting all of that, “was that all you found?”

“Yes, that about sums it up,” Ford says. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

“You got this excited about magnetic rocks?”

“Well, when you put it like that—”

“Did you at least get the satellites online? Or figure out if this Overlap is stable or whatever you were gonna do?”

“Unfortunately, no. By the time I got back to the boat and saw that the calibration came out bad even after I ran it twice, I was already running late. I was planning on going back after we ate dinner.” Stan sighs, all too aware of how easy it is for Ford to get side-tracked when something even slightly bizarre grabs his interest. Though it hasn’t gotten them killed _yet_ (although there were certainly a few close calls), they’ve never been sitting on what could very well be a literal ticking _time_ bomb.

“Well, while you were busy messing around with your fancy dirt, I found something that’s _actually_ interesting. But first, for the love of god, go put on some dry pants.”

* * *

After putting the supplies down in the room (and putting on dry pants), Stan takes the lead. Immediately after they leave the inn, Ford starts peppering him with question after question, trying to get some inkling for where exactly they’re going, what he’s showing him, if it’s a person or a thing. But Stan is silent, only shooting him a smirk and telling him this would be way more exciting than “magnetic dirt”, as he puts it.

Part of him wants to argue that their definitions of “exciting” are notably different in most cases, but something stops him short. It’s almost telling, that knowing look Stan gives him, like he’s sure that what he’s discovered might have the answers Ford has been looking for, like where he’s taking them houses something truly peculiar and he can’t wait to see him react to it.

He lets Stan get away with the anticipatory silent treatment just this once, even if the giddy voice in the back of his head continues churning out more and more questions.

There’s a path that goes down the side of the inn and back into the woods, and that’s the way Stan leads him. It’s well-travelled, the dirt trodden flat and the trees cut back, much more worn than the path out to the beach. They even pass a woman heading back in the opposite direction, a basket on her hip and her eyes watching them inquisitively before she gives a friendly nod and continues past.

Ten more minutes of walking later, they come to a stream, maybe fifteen feet across and a couple feet deep at most, that lazily cuts perpendicular to the path, the water vaguely yellow tinted, but clean aside from that. It must be the nearest source of fresh water, Ford thinks, which would explain why the path here is so heavily travelled. A little ways downstream, there seems to be an old wood bridge, the trees and undergrowth partially blocking the way to it from the main path, which is certainly odd. Stan is still purposely silent, pushing his way through the undergrowth, leading them over the small bridge, and continuing on.

The undergrowth is steadily thicker from then on, though there does seem to still be a vaguely discernable path that they’re following. It just seems old and long-abandoned.

Which is usually a good sign, when it comes to their special breed of scientific inquiry.

But that still begs the question: where _is_ Stan taking him?

That question, as it turns out, is answered when they emerge into an overgrown clearing surrounding a manor that must be at least three times the size of the cabins back in the town square. It’s simply massive, two stories tall with weathered wood siding, wide clouded windows stacked across the entire front, bright red clay tile covering the slanted roof that asymmetrically reaches all the way down to the first story in the back. A short fence reaches around from either side of the building, stretching back and disappearing into the foliage of undergrowth beyond.

As stately as it is, the house has obviously not seen an occupant in some time. A few of the front windows are cracked or shattered, the front door left ajar, weeds and small saplings growing around the edges of the house’s foundation and overtaking the small fence. Unlike the cabins back in the town, no smoke drifts from the chimney despite the chill to the air. The entire area simply feels abandoned, left in nature’s hands some time ago to become one with the forest again.

It answers the question of where Stan is taking him, but it only leaves a million more questions in its wake.

“Don’t even bother asking anything yet,” Stan says preemptively. Ford would be offended that Stan assumed he knew how he’d react if it weren’t for the fact that he literally had just opened his mouth to do exactly that. He quickly snaps it shut. “This isn’t even the interesting part.”            

The inside is just as dilapidated as the outside. Dust and dirt particles hang suspended in the air, caught in the shafts of sunlight filtering in the windows. Wild grasses and small saplings grow up through the floorboards. Oddly enough, all the furniture seems mostly intact, if not covered in dust. One or two chairs around a long dining room table are knocked over, spiderwebs growing between their legs. Something crunches and cracks under their boots, an old ceramic whose largest remaining pieces are the size of pebbles on the ground. An enclosed staircase goes up the middle of the structure, a few stairs broken or missing. The air has the slightest smell of wood-rot, water stains littering the hardwood floor, a few small, green-tinted puddles pooling in uneven parts of the ground.

His first instinct is to start looking around to see what he can find, but Stan immediately heads right to the far back corner of the house. Ford makes a beeline to follow him, the floor squeaking and groaning with his every hurried step.

“Alright,” Stan says, stopping right in front of a narrow doorway in the very back of the house. He motions inside the room with a flourish and a smirk that borders on devious. “Nerds first.”

Barely sparing him an eyeroll, Ford cautiously peeks around the doorframe. The room seems to be a study of sorts, with a few short bookshelves around the room and a desk in the front corner. A small window lets in just enough light to see by, and the ceiling slants from the front of the room down to the back, stopping at about head-level. Altogether, the room isn’t much to look at. There’s a chance it’s in slightly more disarray than the rest of the house, with papers left scattered on the desk, a book lying on the floor in the far back corner, and the faded rug bunched up to one side of the room. But it hardly seems worth all the build-up.

If anything, the only noteworthy thing is that the room remarkably seems to have the least amount of water damage, which he supposes is good for the condition of the books.

“Is something going to jump out at me?” Ford asks suspiciously, still eyeing inside the doorway.

“You honestly think I’d let you walk into a trap?” Stan asks incredulously. “My own brother?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“You still harping on Panama?”

“You let me go into a bar that was filled to the brim with bikers that apparently had it out for you!”

“How was I supposed to know they were there?”

“You made me go in first, and then you _never followed_!”

“Precautionary measure. You’ve got no proof I knew. Now,” two hands land on Ford’s back and push him into the room, “in you go.”

Ford stumbles in rather gracelessly, but to his surprise, nothing happens when he does. Even moments after standing in the middle of the room, everything stays the same. Nothing shifts in the shadows, the peace undisturbed aside from the creak of the wood under his boots and the petulant huff he breathes out once he’s sure he’s in the clear.

“See?” Stan says, following him in and casually leaning against the door frame. “Nothing suspicious or unexpected at all. Just a thoughtful, innocent man showing his nerd of a twin a weird old library.” Except he’s still smirking like there’s some punchline that Ford still hasn’t gotten to, and it’s unnerving. “Just being a good brother.”

“You’re looking a little too smug for a ‘good, innocent brother’,” Ford says, shuffling through some of the papers sprawled across the desk. They seem to be notes of some kind, the pages stained and weathered, words scrawled across in a loose cursive that’s barely legible without some effort. Figuring he’ll come back to those, he shifts his focus to the bunched-up rug on the side of the room, giving it a solid _tap_ with his foot. Satisfied that nothing seems to be crawling or slithering out from under it, he moves on to the other notable item that immediately grabbed his interest: the book lying on the floor on the far side of the study. He crosses the room, an uncomfortable draft catching him about halfway across, before bending down, picking up the book, and flipping through the pages. Interestingly, it seems to be full of dozens of pages written in code, a quick flip through the book revealing no immediately readable words. If this is the “interesting” thing Stan wanted to show him, then he has no idea why they had to come all the way out here instead of Stan just bringing the book, let alone why Stan left it on the floor of all places. Almost as if on autopilot, he starts thinking through his usual Atbash or Caesar Three shift just to rule them out—

“Wait,” Stan says. “How’d you do that?”

“Do what?” Ford asks, one word about halfway down the first page deciphering with the Caesar Three shift (the word is “separated”), but no others. A smaller word he would consider a fluke, but this he has to take note of.

“Don’t tell me it disappeared!” Stan says. Ford finds a second word near the bottom of the same page (“ensure”), after which he looks up as Stan comes stomping across the room, only run face first into…

Well…

_Nothing._

Well, not _nothing_ , because he definitely hits _something_ , a loud _smack_ proceeding Stan stumbling back from the middle of the room, his glasses askew.

“Nope. Definitely still there.”

“What in Tesla—?” Ford exclaims, dropping the book and darting back to the middle of the room.

“And _that’s_ the reaction I was going for,” Stan says, one hand rubbing at his jaw. “Thanks for ruining the joke, magic wall.”

“This doesn’t make any sense.” Ford feels around for the wall Stan seems to have hit, but he can’t seem to find anything in the general area, his hands passing through the air unhindered even as he motions around where he’s _sure_ Stan was standing. The only noticeable feeling he can seem to find is a slight chill or static in the air at one specific are. “Is it still there?” With a grunt, Stan makes his way back and puts his hand out, a few inches from Ford’s face, and leans in. His palm flattens as if he was pressing on glass.

“Yeah, I’d say so.” He puts his other hand out, just next to the first, and grins. “Heh, Sixer look, I’m a mime!” He feigns searching around the wall with an over-exaggerated expression of surprise, gasping and “oo”-ing repeatedly, eventually pressing his face against it. His cheek smushes flat.

“Fascinating,” Ford says, his hands itching to write this down in his journal when they get back to the inn. There aren’t any spells or relics that he can think of that would do this, though his knowledge on those subjects isn’t the most extensive. But he didn’t see any noticeable charms or hexes anywhere on their way in. And he can immediately rule out advanced technology because… well… the 1800s. He pokes Stan’s cheek that’s pressed against it, his finger squishing his brother’s face and not a solid wall of any sort.

“Hey now,” Stan protests, pulling his face back. “You can’t go around poking mimes. That’s _probably_ illegal in France.”

“I thought mimes were silent,” he says off-handedly, pacing around the area and studying Stan’s hands and the air around them. By all accounts, it doesn’t make sense. The wall’s existence alone is enough to garner his interest, but then add in the tidbit that only one of the two of them can perceive it, and things get a whole lot more interesting. How could a wall, magical or otherwise, differentiate between different people, and for what reason? Is it random? What’s so special about the other side of this room that it seems to be blocking certain people from?

“Silent mimes? That doesn’t seem right.”

“I just don’t understand how _I_ can pass through it, but you _can’t_ ,” Ford huffs, waving his hands just below Stan’s, feeling that same cool static tingle and nothing else.

“Maybe it only likes nerds.”

“Maybe,” he says, but he’s not truly convinced that intelligence or IQ is the deciding factor here. It doesn’t feel substantial enough; there would _have_ to be something else to it, even based on the fact that “intelligence” is subjective at best and inherently topic-dependent.

_Although…_

Stan has gone back to pressing his cheek against the invisible wall, sticking his tongue out and generally making the most ridiculous faces and noises he can seem to think of.

_Can’t rule it out._

He shakes the thought with a smirk, picking back up the coded notebook he dropped in his surprise and brushing a bit of dirt off its cover.

“What’s that?” Stan lisps.

“I can’t be certain,” he says, “but I have a gut feeling that this wall, whatever it is,” he tosses the book to Stan, who quickly backs away from the wall to catch it, “has something to do with that.” He flips to the first page, skimming it quickly like Ford did.

“You catch the two words in Caesar Three?”

“Of course.”

“What about the few in Caesar Six?”

“I didn’t make it that far.”

Stan hums noncommittally, flipping through a few more pages. “You think there’s a key?”

“Most likely,” Ford says. “I’d have to assume somewhere in this room.”

“Let me guess,” Stan deadpans, slapping the book closed. “You wanna look for it?”

“Of course.”

With a sigh, Stan tosses the book back, turns, and walks back out through the doorway. “Well, guess I’ll go steal one of the couch cushions since we’ll probably be here a while.”

“Bring me one as well, please!”

“You’ve got legs! Use them!”

Ford faintly hears him mumble something about libraries and stupid magic walls, all of which is followed immediately by the distinctive _thump_ of something soft whacking the ground. He can’t help but snort, grabbing the first book off the nearby bookshelf, sitting on the hard wood floor, and settling in to what is sure to be a long afternoon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Heh_ so I really have no excuse as to why this took so long... My beloved beta had to go back to reread previous chapters just to get back into the AMoT mindset and proceeded to roast me about the note at the end of the prologue that said I'd hoped to write a chapter a week... So, yeah, no excuses here...
> 
> *pats Ford on the head* Don't worry bud. I appreciate your excitement about big magnets... ~~But also, I mean, invisible walls are _definitely_ a lot more interesting~~
> 
> So, the town slowly gets a little odder and odder with each passing chapter, especially with the Eventtm looming on the horizon... Answers are coming, I swear! ~~And I'm _loving_ people theorizing about the different happenings! It's really interesting to see y'all's thoughts!~~
> 
> Anyways, fingers crossed the next chapter comes before 2020!
> 
> Also, [ashesforart made this awesome fanart for the prologue! Go check it out!](https://pinesbrosfalls.tumblr.com/post/179160709841/ashesforart-a-capture-of-my-favorite-scene-in)

**Author's Note:**

> Check me out on [Tumblr](https://pinesbrosfalls.tumblr.com/)!


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